Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (schools)/Archive 5

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Proposed currently?

I have changed the tag from disputed to proposed - the dispute was over the previous version of this page, not the current one. Currently, as far as I can see, we are just tinkering with what the final guideline is going to be. As soon as consensus is established for adoption of a proposal - the accepted tag can be put on. Camaron1 | Chris 17:04, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

It's a pity we can't get some input from editors from other countries as the debate is currently dominated by American editors. I'm still not convinced that we should be recommending the double location parameter 'in a nutshell' as the disambiguation method for all schools. The US, Canada and Australia are probably exceptions rather than the rule because in all these countries people tend to use the double parameter in everyday speech in a way which they don't in other countries. We don't want to make disambiguation unnecessarily complicated. Dahliarose 22:14, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Not to be nationalist, but those three countries together comprise the largest population of english speakers in the world (Much more than half) so by definition, they are the rule. Adam McCormick 04:03, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
We do have to look for the longterm though - most schools on the En Wikipedia might be in English speaking countries now, but eventually En Wikipedia will have better coverage of schools in other very large countries such as China and India. It is going to be very difficult to simplify world location parameters without been to vague. Camaron1 | Chris 08:36, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Ok, well then how about we adjust the guideline as follows:
The general form for a disambiguated School article title is: [[School Name (location)]]
location disambiguation is municipality if none of the following apply:
  • us, canada and australia use (municiaplity, state/region)
  • if there are multiple schools with the same name within the same municipality then further disambiguation is required (borough/suburb/? municipality)
  • if the place name used for disambiguation is ambiguous, it needs to be disambiguated one name further so that people know which surrey and which georgia
  • if a school is named after an ambiguous place name and it needs to be disambiguated, the name should not be repeated in disambiguation (this one is already in the guideline)
all of the rules have been stated before at some time or another--some are in the guideline right now but need to be rewritten. the issue of disambiguating some places (UK?) to (borough, municipality) was raised, so that should be decided. but if we can sort those things out and find examples for the ones we're missing I think we're good, no? what do people think of this? Miss Mondegreen talk  10:29, July 6 2007 (UTC)

There is no place for nationalist prejudices on Wikipedia. Just because the vast majority of school articles are American we should not produce US-specific guidelines and then inappropriately enforce them on the rest of the world. There is already an existing Wikipedia project for countering such bias. See: Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias. In the absence of input from editors from other countries I've been looking at the List of schools by country to gauge what the current practice is as this is presently our best measure of common sense usage. I have not gone through every single country, and in fact many large countries, such as China, don't even appear to have any school articles at all. For many other countries the sample size is not large enough to establish what the current practice is. However, as far as I can establish most countries use just one place name qualifier. The format varies from country to country. Here are a few examples:

Therefore, as I've already argued, on a country count the dual parameter format used for American, Canadian and Australian schools is the exception rather than the rule. There are inevitably going to be differences from one country to another and I think all we can hope to do is establish consistency within countries. If we can't reach agreement perhaps we should go back to my original suggestion and make this a guideline for US school names only. Dahliarose 10:40, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

In reply to Miss M's comments I agree that the nutshell should show School (location) as the preferred form for disambiguation. We should then list specific exceptions (such as US, Canada, and Australia), separately in the guideline. Surrey and Georgia would not be a problem as the English county would not be included in English schools and the country would not be included for schools in Georgia. The North American places would all have their own distinctive double location parameters.Dahliarose 10:46, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
I agree that we should not be bias to-wards specific countries. However, I think we should cut down the world-wide guideline to School (Location) with School, Location been ruled out. I don't think there are any cultural reasons between the choice of either style - until now it was just up to the article creator! I say to stick to brackets as that appears to be used more and allows for double location parameters (such as School (Place, Place)), unlike the comma. Camaron1 | Chris 15:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
I think I remember reading somewhere that a decision had already been reached about the use of brackets rather than the comma format. (I have however noticed that most UK churches seem to use the comma format rather than brackets). I propose that the nutshell should read as follows:

We would also need to have separate sections with disambiguation examples for all the main English-speaking countries. Dahliarose 17:17, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree whole-heartedly with that, but it's a little long-winded for a nutshell. I would just make the location a link to the section/page on settlement naming and on what to do for each country like so:
That way we don't show any national bias, one way or the other Adam McCormick 17:45, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
I think Adams is my choice - I am glad we are reaching an agreement. We can then go on to specify the rules for every country in the article itself. Camaron1 | Chris 21:53, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Moving forward

I'm pleased we're finally getting somewhere. I've had a go at redrafting the page based on Adam's revised nutshell. I've set up a framework for providing examples for each English-speaking country where I believe we have consensus. (I'm not too sure what to do about New Zealand. A lot of work is still needed, but at least it's a start. I would imagine most of the existing overview section could be incorporated into the US section. Dahliarose 22:29, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

OK, here's a problem

How do we disambiguate Dartford Grammar School for Girls and Dartford Grammar School when they are in the same city located near each other, both only admit girls but are very different schools. Help? Adam McCormick 03:35, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

We don't need to as both schools have unique names! It might help, however, if both schools had 'hatnotes' with links to the other school. The intros and infoboxes are not very clear on either article. One is a boys' grammar which admits girls only in the sixth form, and the other is a girls' grammar, but neither article makes this very clear. Dahliarose 09:59, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
I don't agree, they could both be called "Dartford Grammar School" and anywhere but Dartford itself, noone would know which was which. Adam McCormick 18:36, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
But they're not both called Dartford Grammar School. Both articles use the actual school names. There are quite a few of the old grammar schools which are named in this way. Under the old grammar school/secondary modern system, most towns had their own grammar school(s), and quite often there were separate grammar schools for boys and girls. There are a few more named in a similar way in Category:Grammar schools in Kent. I've added the appropriate hatnotes to the two Dartford school pages. I still don't understand the problem. We can't be responsible for the way schools are named. There are presumably only two Dartford grammar schools in the whole world, and with hatnotes on each page, it is easy to go from one article to the other. Dahliarose 19:27, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
I didn't understand the issue completely, sorry. Hatnotes should be plenty of disambiguation. I am just of the opinion that we should disambiguate anywhere that there could reasonably be a misunderstanding. If this was Somename High School and Someday Secondary School wouldn't they be disambiguated? It just seems like adding the extra word doesn't do enough in most cases, especially for schools that go by a lot of names (Not that these two fall under that group) Adam McCormick 20:13, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, yes and no Adam. It is the same or similar names, but there are only two in this case, so hatnotes are the way to go. There's no need to move dartford grammar school, create an unnecessary disambiguation page and break a lot of links. If there were a lot of dartfords, then yes, this would be proper. But it is often the case that there are two schools with the same or a similar name and it stops there. They are often close by, or related in some manner. Generally, if they are completely unrelated and there are at least three, it's a sign that there are or will be more. But, yes, it is important to disambiguate similar names. The unique part of the name is often one word, and system changes often change the type of school---the lengthy addendum which makes the name specific enough, unique enough. It's important to look at the specifics of a case before going full speed ahead. While disambiguating early has a lot of positive benefits, we don't want to unnecessarily. Miss Mondegreen talk  23:07, July 11 2007 (UTC)

Massive Disamb issue

The schools listed at Lasallian_educational_institutions and this search are in need of a major reorganization and disambiguation effort Adam McCormick 04:10, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

US schools

Am I right in thinking that we are currently recommending that American schools which have the location parameter in the title only require disambiguation by state rather than municipality as well? I'm just wondering if for the sake of consistency it would be easier to include both parameters for all US schools which need disambiguation. If we don't we could end up with potentially confusing disambiguation pages. Have a look at the disambiguation page for Lakewood High School as an example. Some of these schools are named after a place called Lakewood and some aren't. However, they nearly all seem to have used the single state parameter for disambiguation purposes. Dahliarose 10:23, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

As per earlier discussion about TPS, I don't think we should ever see Lakewood High School (Lakewood, Colorado) but we should see Lakewood High School (Hebron, Ohio). As for as the Disambiguation page goes, it should just be:
  • Lakewood High School:
    • <list of cities and states>
  • Lakewood Secondary School:
    • <list of cities and states>
Does that sound right? Adam McCormick 18:34, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Are you saying that the layout of the Lakewood High School disambiguation page is incorrect? If so, we could really do with setting up a model disambiguation page to show the preferred format. On the current disambiguation page for Lakewood High School the schools are all listed with their full Wikipedia name showing in brackets. Anyone starting a new article for another Lakewood High School would probably look at what had been done before and follow the existing examples. If they see a school called Lakewood High School (Colorado) they might then think that the usual format is just to disambiguate by state, without realising that the Lakewood place name has been omitted to avoid any duplication. Dahliarose 19:34, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
I am saying that a format as I wrote it above seems easier to understand. And, as long as the redlinks are right, there shouldn't be a problem with creating new pages. I'd think anyone wanting to write an article about a "Lakewood High School" from the list would use the link and, hopefully, would follow this guideline otherwise. If this is an issue then we need to rethink the location exemption. Adam McCormick 19:52, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
The format you propose does seem easier to understand but it is not the format which has been followed on any of the school disambiguation pages I've looked at. I don't have any strong feelings either way, but I would have thought it would be easier to follow current practice rather than to have a wholesale re-organisation of all the existing disambiguation pages. The priority is probably to make sure that all the existing red links are properly named so that people will give a new school article the correct title. I change them as I come across them but I'm only scratching at the surface. Dahliarose 22:59, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
There isn't any particular format followed for school disambiguation pages (in general) so I should think it needs to be covered in the guideline. I'm not saying every disambiguation page needs to be changed, but it would at least be nice to have something from here on out. Adam McCormick 23:38, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
The format you proposed doesn't work because it's the non-Lakewood part that's most susceptible to change. Districts change and add schools and do funky things, and they change junior highs to middles and some to highs and some highs to junior highs and some secondary schools become high schools and some become middle schools and really longstanding schools aren't susceptible to that, but most schools haven't been around for forever. The unique part of the name is what's really important, especially when there are tons of them. The page makes more sense to be organized by place then by type of school--since the former is not likely to change, and I'd suggest that the location of the disambiguation page be neutral. For example--Lakewood School and both Lakewood High School and Lakewood Secondary School could redirect to it. People often don't write out the full name when searching for a place or school anyway. Miss Mondegreen talk  04:17, July 12 2007 (UTC)

ambiguous place names

This goes back to the ambiguous place name problem. If there's more than one school in the same place the name of the municipality is irrelevant. It needs more specific disambiguation in order to specifiy the differences. If there was more than one Forrest School in Berkshire--

Going back to the Surrey example. This is what happens when there are two schools of the same name that need to be disambiguated, and then the place that they need to be disambiguated to (in this case Surrey) is ambiguous)

[[Example school A (Surrey, British Columbia)]]
[[Example school A (Vancouver, British Columbia)]]

[[Example school B (Winnersh)]]
[[Example school B (Surrey, England)]]

[[Example school C (White Plains, North Dakota)]]
[[Example school C (Surrey, North Dakota)]]

[[Example school D (Middlesex, Jamaica)]] also fully diambiguated--not ambiguous
[[Example school D (Surrey, Jamaica)]]

What we're talking about is when the name of the school is not unique and the schools are named after place names that are not unique. And sometimes, like with the example, there are schools named after places that are just located someplace completely different. Sometimes this is because the school is chain like, or because they are emulating a school or whatnot. At any rate, this is what happens:

[[Surrey Academy of the Performing Arts (Los Angeles, California)]] -- Los Angeles, California

[[Surrey Acadamy of the Performing Arts (Jamaica)]] -- Surrey, Jamaica

[[Surrey Academy of the Performing Arts (England)]] -- Surrey, England

[[Surrey Academy of the Performing Arts]] -- Middlesex, Jamaica

[[Surrey Academy of the Performing Arts (Winnersh)]] -- Winnersh, England

[[Surrey Academy of the Performing Arts (British Columbia)]] -- Surrey, British Columbia

Does this make sense to everyone now? We just don't have the stuff on ambiguous place names written in yet Miss Mondegreen talk  22:59, July 11 2007 (UTC)

This is in fact a different problem altogether. We seem to be suggesting that for US schools the first part of the location parameter isn't necessary when it is included in the title. My concern is that this could potentially lead to confusion. The following examples are hypothetical but demonstrate the potential problem:

Golden Valley High School (California) in Golden Valley, California Golden Valley High School (Texas) in Golden Valley, Texas Golden Valley High School (Townsville, Maryland) in Townsville, Maryland

A new Wikipedia contributor (who is unlikely to find the school naming convention page when he first starts out) wants to create a new article on Golden Valley High School in Newtown, Kansas. He will therefore look at the existing school titles, but will not understand the format. He knows that there is only one Golden Valley High School in the whole of Kansas so he names his new page as Golden Valley High School (Kansas). Whatever is decided I think we need to clarify the US section to make the format very clear. Dahliarose 08:43, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Defining "Unique"

I would like to add the following section before the disambiguation section (with less equal signs than seen here of course) Adam McCormick 18:21, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

That looks fine. I've just added a few tips about searching. Dahliarose 19:48, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
One should search for notable and verify that none of the results are schools regardless of level, location or qualifier? Guess what happens if you search for notable on wikipedia? You're taken here--no list of search results, just here. In order to search on Wikipedia and get a realistic set of results, you have to search wikipedia through a search engine. We should provide to searching within Wikipedia with the top search engines and instruct people to do their wiki searching in a search engine. Besides, getting a list for notable and looking through it for schools would take forever. But searching for the unique word or phrase AND school seriously cuts the list down. Is school enough or do they need to try multiple searches? "unique word or phrase" AND school / "unique word or phrase" AND university etc.
But this won't work for certain schools--like "The Notable Secondary School of Florence". Notable isn't a unique (should it be an unique? it looks right but it's impossible to say!) word--and I know that the rest of the name isn't unique either, but when the school is made up of a string like that, using one word doesn't work. For example, University High School. Not a single word in their is unique, although the university part is what the school is named for, searching for university would be folly itself. Searching for "notable" or notable AND school is ridiculous. Miss Mondegreen talk  04:11, July 12 2007 (UTC)
The Notable School was perhaps a bad example. Perhaps we should simply say that you should search on the shortest feasible form of the school name. A good example would be searching for Saint Paul rather than St Paul's School or St Paul's College. The page for St Paul provides a long list of all the colleges and schools named after St Paul. There are links to separate disambiguation pages for St Paul's School (disambiguation) and St Paul's College. You don't need a search engine to search Wikipedia for a specific word. All you have to do is click on "Search" rather than "Go" and it returns all occurrences of that word. There are literally thousands of notables. Dahliarose 13:46, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm sorry if my example was confusing, I was paraphrasing notes. The "shortest feasible form" was what I was going for and I was trying to say that it doesn't matter if the match is an elementary, a secondary school or a private academy, only that the names are similar. And I think it's "a unique" because it's a pronunciation based rule not a spelling-based one, like "an herb" (maybe that's only an american thing though) Adam McCormick 16:15, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I've amended the example below to read De La Salle High School. The addition of Florence in the school title gives a seemingly unique name, whereas the removal of the location makes the name much more likely to be duplicated. High school is also more likely to be used in a school name, as secondary school (in the UK at least) is normally used for categorising the sector rather than within school names. As an aside, in British English we would say a herb not an herb. You do sometimes come across 'an hotel' but I think it's mostly an old-fashioned usage. Dahliarose 22:35, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
My entire point is that it's not unique even with "Florence". It can still be confused with other articles, a page could still be created with the wrong title by someone who didn't realize "Florence" was part of the name. I suppose I just don't think that anything on this page or at this search could be considerred unique, even though a lot of the names don't exactly match. Adam McCormick 22:48, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
When you look at all the De La Salle Schools it's surprising how many of the names are in fact unique, even though they are all very similar. I don't see any need to disambiguate between a school called De La Salle High School of Florence and another one called De La Salle High School of Venice as both names are unique. Clearly however we have to disambiguate when there are a number of schools called De La Salle High School. That's why I think the addition of the location to the name in the example is misleading as this is clearly not a case where disambiguation would be necessary. The other problem that these La Salle schools raise is that quite a few of them seem to have their own unique names which don't follow any of our school naming patterns, for example, De La Salle Lipa is the actual name of the school as can be seen from the school crest, so we can't change the name to De La Salle (Lipa) or De La Salle, Lipa. A lot of the schools seem to have a hyphen included as part of their school name which seems distinctly odd, but it's the official school name so it can't be changed. Looking again at the La Salle schools, it seems that there is a distinct preference for schools in America and Canada to use the parentheses format and for schools elsewhere to use the comma format. Dahliarose 14:59, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
OK, my problem isn't with schools like De La Salle High School of Florence and De La Salle High School of Venice but with De La Salle High School of Florence and a school called De La Salle High School that happens to be in Florence. do we then allow for De La Salle High School (Florence) and De La Salle High School of Florence because they aren't exactly the same? It seems like the names are, in substance, the same. Adam McCormick 15:44, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
I would have thought that the chances of there being two schools with the exact same name located in two different places which also share the same name are pretty remote. No one has yet been able to come up with any examples. In the case of Florence, there is the well-known city in Italy, and there also numerous places in America called Florence. If such an unlikely situation did arise, you would therefore presumably have De La Salle High School (Florence, Italy), De La Salle High School (Florence, Alabama), etc. (or with commas if it is decided that that is the preferred convention). If the official names of both schools is De La Salle High School of Florence, presumably Italy and Alabama would be inserted after the names in brackets or commas. If there was a school which was called De La Salle High School of Florence and another school called De La Salle High School in a place called Florence, then we'd have to follow the format you suggest. The chances of such a situation occurring a pretty remote. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dahliarose (talk • contribs).

"I would have thought that the chances of there being two schools with the exact same name located in two different places which also share the same name are pretty remote. No one has yet been able to come up with any examples.">

What? We just had an entire discussion about Lakewood High Schools--several of which are actually located in Lakewoods (though mysteriously enough, not all of them). The De Le Salle yada yada yada case shows the need to treat these cases differently. Sometimes attaching a place name to the name of a school helps make it unique. Sometimes it doesn't. What should be done with the list of De le salles? Well there are several obvious disambiguation pages needed--for when the names are exactly the same, or really really close. But we also need additional ones for when the only distinguishing feature is the location. Unless someone is really familiar with the school, they may not remember the exact place. They may remember "somewhere in Italy" or "something that sounded like this"--we disambiguated and place guiding hatnotes based on ambiguity and we have to approach this from the user's shoes. We'll need hatnotes from one disambiguation page to the other sometimes--sometimes just from individual articles, and a disambiguation page that links to other pages. All of the articles should link to something organized that helps them find the correct article if they didn't find it on the first go around. And all of the articles should be disambiguated. It's just foolish not too. Miss Mondegreen talk  01:31, July 16 2007 (UTC)
I don't think I explained myself very well! I know we have all the Lakewood High Schools, but because they're all in the US and Canada we're including the state/province in parentheses so there is no ambiguity. The USA probably accounts for a fair quantity of ambiguous place names because a lot of them are named after places in Europe. I can't think of a single example of a school elsewhere whose name isn't unique once you've included the location parameter. For instance there are lots of schools named after King Edward (see King Edward's Schools) but none of these schools share both a name and a location. If there was, for instance, a King Edward's School in Birmingham, Alabama as well as the existing one of the same name in Birmingham, England, then it would be a different matter. As you say, the disambiguation pages are the key to help people locate the article they're looking for. At the moment if you type in King Edward VII School you are taken to a seemingly non-notable school in South Africa. There are hatnotes for two King Edward VII schools and the other ones can only be found by clicking on the article for King Edward's School, whereas King Edward VII School should really be the disambiguation page. On another note altogether are we agreed that the section below can now be added to the main page? Dahliarose 22:34, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

indent, take two
Ok, using England as an example, there are lots of place names that are ambigious because the same place exists in England and Canada, or England and Australia, and Canada and Australia are both very likely to have schools a la King Edwards. I consider the UK a tie for the biggest problem along with the US--because in terms of colonization and the spread of names that's where the biggest problem is with ambiguous place names, and the biggest problem for weird cases. Also, I still have a problem with the language of the "unique" instructions. It tells people to search in terms of Wikipedia, but it needs to specifically say that that searching needs to be done in terms of an outside search engine. (i.e. http://www.google.com/custom?domains=en.wikipedia.org&q=+&sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org) We should provide links to search Wikipedia only through Google, Yahoo, etc. Miss Mondegreen talk  04:22, July 17 2007 (UTC)

I've commented below about UK place names. I've looked at large numbers of UK schools, and I don't think they are such a problem as you imagine. It's surprising how many have unique names and very few seem to need disambiguating. The problem for UK schools is not so much with the names but the lack of foresight in creating the appropriate disambiguation pages, such as the King Edward VII school example. The other problem is the lack of consistency in the disambiguation format (brackets vs. commas). I don't understand your commment about searching Wikipedia through an external search engine. Why should this be necessary? A Google search will pick up references not just within Wikipedia but elsewhere as well. We could perhaps recommend searching with other search engines as well as different search engines can sometimes yield different results. Dahliarose 08:43, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Determining if a school is unique

First, verify that there are no other articles on Wikipedia about schools with the exact name of the school. If there is no such school, try removing any qualifiers from the name and repeat the search using the shortest feasible form of the name. (For example, for an article on De La Salle High School one should run a search for "De La Salle" and verify that none of the results are schools, regardless of level, location, or qualifier). Finally, if no other article exists, run the same searches on a search engine such as Google and verify that no other school is substantially represented in the results. When searching on Google, place the search terms in quote marks to narrow down the results. A search for "De La Salle" will yield results from pages containing only this precise sequence of words. If none of these methods produces a result, the school should be considered "unique".

The UK thing

village, town, city, London borough

I think it's too small. We don't go that small anywhere else, just in the UK and I'm wondering why. I think if we do one parameter it should be county, and (village/town/city/London borough, county) if more detailed disambiguation is needed, or we should just have it be that way--two parameters normally, but I don't get this. Also, it is one more complication, and not really the way things are being done now, for the most part. Also, the county is generally going to be the more known name. Thoughts? Miss Mondegreen talk  04:38, July 17 2007 (UTC)

We are following the policy of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements). The United Kingdom section recommends a single location parameter for the UK. The guideline also recommends a single location parameter for place names in Europe and Africa. The same practice would presumably apply to European and African schools. I would guess that the logic for this is that the European place names came first. All the New World countries (Canada, Australia, USA, etc) named many of their places after the European names. The normal practice in New World Countries is to use the double parameter format in everyday speech (a practice which presumably developed to distinguish the new settlements from their old European counterparts) whereas this is not the case for European countries. Certainly most of the UK schools I've looked at have used the single location parameter, and current practice is a good indicator of the consensus view. Dahliarose 08:31, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
OK. But why Dorking instead of Surrey? If a school in Redhill, Surrey is not unique and needs to be disambiguated it then becomes [[School name (Redhill, Surrey, England)]] because Redhill isn't a unique name, and neither is Surrey. Anywhere else we disambiguate we aren't doing it to the smallest level of government possible and this seems really odd to make an exception here. I agree with one parameter following the settlements guideline, but I don't understand this part. Miss Mondegreen talk  08:48, July 17 2007 (UTC)
Dorking isn't a level of government. It is a large market town, the name is unique and there is no ambiguity. English counties can be very confusing. The boundaries keep getting changed and then you have all the large metropolitan areas such as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Merseyside, etc. where places are not in counties at all. London in itself is huge and bigger in population terms than many small countries. It makes much more sense to use the London borough (ie, Forest School (Walthamstow) rather than Forest School (London). People aren't familiar with local government areas in the UK and I wouldn't have a clue which council covers Dorking for instance. Some places come under the countrol of county councils, others have unitary authorities, others have metropolitan authorities. Again the boundaries keep changing all the time, and this type of terminology is not used. If the place name isn't unique then it perhaps makes sense to include the county as well, eg, School name (Redhill, Surrey]]. This also conforms with the recommmendations in the Settlements guideline. Using the country as well would be complete overkill. The addition of the county distinguishes Redhill in Surrey from the Redhills in other places. All the other places called Surrey are in US states or Canadian provinces so there would be no confusion as you would have School name (Surrey, Texas). Dahliarose 09:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I think that if we're trying to make this guideline easy to follow we should assume the disambiguation section of the UK guideline which is (placename, county), this also gels with a lot of the articles I've seen which I tentify themselves (in text mostly) in this way, and makes it easy for an international audience to identify the place. For instance, I've never heard of "Redhill" (Til just now) but I have heard of "Surrey" and I'm sure there are plenty of others for whome (Redhill) just wouldn't mean much. Adam McCormick 13:32, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
On the point of disambiguating Surrey, first off, by looking at the name of an article: [[School (redhill, surrey)]] I wouldn't know which surrey it was unless I either knew the place well or the naming rules so intimately that with the knowledge that surrey was an ambigious place name, they could figure out that since it wasn't disambiguated past that, it must be in a one parameter place, and the prior parameter, redhill was also ambiguous and therefore needed further disambiguation to surrey. But both Jamaica and England are one parameter disambiguations (for the moment) so they'd be stuck and have to guess. Since that is completely and totally unrealistic, people are just likely to assume that it's whatever surrey they know best. Which could be England and could be Australia or Canada or the US or Jamaica. Which is why it needs to be disambiguated. This is what you get when you have lots of colonies and conquer the world. A complete and total lack of originality in naming the places that the flag was stuck. Let's just deal with it.
I agree with Adam by the way, I wouldn't know most of those town etc names--as in, couldn't place half of them in the right place on the globe. The counties/whatever are definitely more well known. Miss Mondegreen talk  13:52, July 17 2007 (UTC)
I thought this issue had already been decided. The point is that it is already Wikipedia policy that European place name articles should only have one parameter unless they require disambiguation. Why should we go against existing practice for schools? UK schools are already in the main disambiguated in this way because it is the most natural way of doing it, and current practice is a very good indicator of consensus. Dorking is an article (not Dorking, Surrey). If we have an ambiguously named school in Dorking why should it be named Any School (Dorking, Surrey) rather than the simpler and easier-to-link form Any School (Dorking). It doesn't matter that the average reader doesn't know from the title where Dorking is as the information will be at the very beginning of the article and also in the disambiguation page. There are lots of schools with ambiguous place names in their titles. I expected Guildford Grammar School to be in Guildford, Surrey, but in fact it is in Perth, Western Australia. Similarly there is a Redhill School which is not in Redhill, Surrey or Redhill, Somerset, but in Johannesburg, South Africa. I don't, however, see any need to include the location information in the article title as it is immediately apparent once you start to read the article, though it can be confusing if you come across these schools out of context. I agree however that if a school has to be disambiguated and the place name, such as Redhill, is ambiguous then the county should be included (eg, Any School (Redhill, Surrey). I don't however think there is any need to pre-emptively disambiguate all European schools in such a way. In other words, we should follow the existing naming conventions guideline for settlements. Dahliarose 14:44, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
If "It doesn't matter that the average reader doesn't know from the title where Dorking is" why do we disambiguate with place names at all? Why not founding dates, or colors, or motto? The entire point of disambiguation is so that the average reader (and therefore, the average editor) knows what he or she is linking to and an unambiguous placename is the best way of doing that. Ans as far as this being settled, we haven't had much input beyond your insistence that this is what should be done. I'd like to hear from a larger group before we say it's decided. Adam McCormick 15:07, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
The lack of input makes it very difficult to establish any form of guideline. I'm not insisting that this is the way it should be done. In the absence of input from a more international cross-section of editors I've suggested that we take a cautious approach and follow the existing place name guidelines. The place name guidelines have presumably been agreed by a much wider community and do have a consensus. No one seems to be suggesting that Dorking should be renamed Dorking, Surrey, England because the average editor doesn't know where Dorking is, and Dorking, Surrey is confusing because there are lots of other Surreys in the world. Why should we name schools any differently? If we start going against existing practice and current guidelines we'll end up with another complete fiasco like The Petersfield School, which changed its name to all sorts of things like The Petersfield School, Hampshire, England, The Petersfield School, Petersfield, Hampshire etc, etc. before common sense prevailed and it was established that the school name is unique and it should be named, as it originally was, The Petersfield School. The average reader is probably not going to have a clue where Petersfield is. A Canadian might think the school was in Petersfield, Manitoba, Canada, whereas an American might think the school was in Petersfield, South Carolina, but does this mean we have to put the location details in the title? We would then be going back to pre-emptive disambiguation for all school names and I thought we'd already agreed that we shouldn't do this. Do you not agree that in the absence of input from other editors, a study of the existing disambiguation names for schools is the best way to gauge current opinion? If not, do you have any other suggestions? Dahliarose 15:52, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Have to agree on this. To answer your above point, the current local government district for Dorking is Mole Valley. Using a different set of criteria for disambiguating school locations doesn't make much sense and will lead to endless move requests to rename articles in line with everything else in local area categories.
One point I don't think has been covered too well is when there is ambiguity about just what the locations - this is a particular problem for Surrey as the historic county, postal county and ceremonial/administrative county (fortunately there's no difference between those two) have different boundaries and the postal addresses in particular have preserved the name beyond the current boundaries. Some schools in Greater London may be giving their location as Surrey/Middlesex/Essex/Kent. But at least here we have the London Boroughs.
However at a more local level, the exact boundary between villages and towns isn't always clear, especially when there isn't a local government boundary in the vicinity or when a more obvious boundary occurrs. For example my prep school, Downsend School (also in Mole Valley), has always said it is in Leatherhead - see its website and postal that is the postal town. The year before I started the M25 motorway opened and many would consider this to be the boundary between Ashtead and Leatherhead. (In fact I think the current ward boundaries for Mole Valley council do indeed use this to separate the Ashtead and Leatherhead wards.) But Downsend is just on the Ashtead side of the motorway (literally next to it). Luckily so far "Downsend School"
What exactly do we do in cases where either it's not 100% just where a school actually is located or where the school claims to be in a place where the Wikipedia article says it isn't? Timrollpickering 16:47, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm pleased we have another voice to contribute to the debate! I agree that using council names would be totally confusing. Anyone not from the Leatherhead area wouldn't have a clue what Mole Valley was. All the local government administrative districts keep getting changed around and renamed anyway. I believe there is a consensus that the modern county names should be used rather than the historic ones (so no Rutland or Middlesex and London boroughs are in London not in the old counties). Presumably the onus is on the editor when discussing the history of the school to make it clear to the reader that, for instance, their particular school is now in the London borough of Wandsworth but was formerly in the county of Surrey. I presume the geographical county should be used which I would guess conforms to the ceremonial county. Postal districts can be very confusing as you often have towns in one county with a postal address from a town in the neighbouring county. It's much easier to avoid any mention of the county altogether! If there is any dispute about a school's location then I would have thought it advisable that sources should be used to back up claims. If there are differing views then both views should be quoted backed up by appropriate sources. If sources can't be found then the statements shouldn't be there! Some places get moved around from one county to another with boundary changes (eg, Bournemouth was in Dorset but is now in Hampshire - or is it the other way round?) and no doubt could potentially get moved again. Dahliarose 18:06, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I don't think we're saying anything about preemptive disambiguation here. The context of all of this is that we would only disambiguate if there is a naming conflict. I just think that if we're going to disambiguate we should do it completely and uniformly so that reading it is easy. I don't see that villiage is enough of a disambiguation, as per Timrollpickering's point above, this is rarely as cut and dry as county location and villiage locations change much more than counties.
And I think that the TPS example is completely out of context. We didn't disambiguate because it's location was in the name, then we cut preemptive disambioguation all together. A better question would be what we would do if there was a The Petersfield School somewhere else, for example (though the place doesn't exist so far as I know) Peterfield, Essex, wouldn't we have to disambiguate by county? Adam McCormick 18:17, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm inclined to agree with TRP; local government areas are no good as disambiguators for schools in the UK - not just because they are often obscurely-named, but mainly because most local authorities have nothing to do with schools anyway - Local Education Authorities are usually the County Council, except in metropolitan boroughs and London boroughs.
However, as has been shown above, using County/Met Borough names may be insufficient disambiguation given that many counties can be large and potentially have two similar named schools. Therefore, I would suggest that this should simply be a matter of discretion - use whichever disambiguator makes appropriate sense in the context. This would usually be the name of the village/town/city in which the school is located, however could be altered if required by the addition of second-level disambiguators (say the county in this case). Cheers, DWaterson 18:31, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
As an illustrative example, one that comes to mind is the King Edward's Schools - ignoring the issue of the seven in Birmingham (as they are all subtly differently named), think of the problem with King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon and King Edward VI College, Nuneaton, both in Warwickshire. DWaterson 18:42, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Oh bugger, those two are unique - misread the second one :( But you get the idea :P DWaterson 18:51, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

I understand what you mean! If I've understood correctly the suggestion was that in this case (if the two schools were indeed named the same) we would have King Edward VI School (Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire and King Edward VI School (Nuneaton, Warwickshire). Clearly we can't disambiguate purely by county as that is not specific enough when you have two schools of the same name in the same county. Like you I think we need to use common sense which will in most cases mean using the single parameter(which in fact is what both schools have chosen to do anyway).

With regards to Adam's point about villages, village names remain constant and have done often for a thousand years or more, though of course spellings have been standardised over time. County boundaries on the other hand change all the time and a village might find itself in one county one year and in another county in the next. There are quite possibly some schools with large landholdings which are split across two different counties. I've even heard of a house which was once half in Berkshire and half in Oxfordshire. TRP's point was that some schools have ambiguous addresses. I would imagine these are usually schools in the countryside which are perhaps equidistant between two places. The other problem is that not all UK places, eg all the large metropolitan areas which account for most of the population, are within the ceremonial counties. You'd therefore have to use London, Birmingham, Manchester etc. in place of the county name, and this could lead to even more confusion as there are a number of places with these names. There is no ambiguity about Any School (Handsworth), but there would be if we used the format Any School (Birmingham) or Any School (Handsworth, Birmingham). Dahliarose 21:42, 17 July 2007 (UTC) 19:49, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm guessing that was Dahliarose above, I can agree with Burrow or Ceremonial county as the second parameter, but from the map I've seen there aren't any areas of the UK outside the counties, is it just a bad map? Let me see if I get the whole arguments here: You'd like one parameter (ie (Villiage)) because you feel that in the vast majority of cases that's enough to disambiguate an article, The other side is that two parameters (ie (Villiage, Burrow/County)) would distinguish between like-named localities and schools at once and, if I've got this straight, your problem is that it would happen before the conflict existed. Is that right? Adam McCormick 20:59, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Oh, and Handsworth is not unique without Birmingham or west midlands because there are: Handsworth, West Midlands and Handsworth, South Yorkshire Adam McCormick 21:06, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Do you guys enjoy this? Every place in the world that has a wikipedia page has a unique name. If there is a problem then those who are "into" place names sort it out. Is a school in the couty of "West Mids", "Warwickshire" or "Birmingham" ... well what does there postal address say? Can I think of an example that breaks these rules? ... course I can ... I got an "A*" for creativity, I m off to use it. I'm sounding "grumpy" cos I suspect this argument will run and run Victuallers 21:40, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Handsworth was obviously a bad example and I'd forgotten that the county is officially West Midlands rather than Birmingham! I'm sure it was Birmingham once, and possibly even Warwickshire at one time too! It just shows the extent of the problem when you start including a second parameter. The UK administrative divisions are very complicated, not least because they keep changing so much. There is another county map here if it's of any help. Some of these so-called ceremonial counties are artificial creations such as Greater Manchester and Merseyside, but it would be quite ridiculous to name a school Any School (Manchester, Greater Manchester). Then there are all the metropolitan boroughs, and especially those within London. You'd really have to live in the specific part of London to know how to disambiguate a particular school name. In practice it's mostly small primary schools which are located in villages (without the 'i') and very few of these will have their own articles. Most secondary schools are in towns and cities. In fact it's surprising how few UK schools actually need disambiguating. It's mostly the saints, kings and queens, but even then, as we've seen, the schools can be remarkably creative in coming up with slight variations to make their name unique. As far as I can establish virtually all UK schools have been disambiguated with an appropriate single location parameter and I see no reason to enforce a change. By all means include something in the guideline to the effect that a second parameter should be included if the place name is ambiguous. Town/county is probably the most easily understood and commonly used format. It would get too complicated to go into all the ins and outs of the different permutations of suburbs and boroughs. I'm not even sure myself of what to call them all, especially in London. I would guess that the second location parameter would in any case rarely be necessary. As Victuallers says, let common sense prevail, otherwise we'll just keep going round and round in circles. Dahliarose 22:57, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
(Written whilst Dahliarose posted answering some of this, then my connection died), but I'll post this anyway).
Okay to try to explain the county mess...
The problem is that in the UK "county" is a term with several different meanings (see Counties of the United Kingdom and particularly the details in Counties of England) and through a combination of governments not wanting to arouse feelings, administrative incompetency and the Royal Mail being financially stretched at the time local government changes took effect there are several different definitions of "county" in popular usage. In my opinion the main, but not sole, cause of the problem is the Royal Mail's policy on addresses over the years. For example Sutton was historically in Surrey until 1965, when it was swallowed up by the creation of Greater London. However the London postal district is smaller and has never been modified to match London local government. Consequently people in Sutton still used "Surrey" as the county in their addresses. (In 1996 the Royal Mail dropped the absolute requirement for a county in the address and people are free to use what they like; however many people are unaware of this.) As a result there are many in Sutton who think they live in Surrey, give their county as "Surrey" and are even surprised to find they're eligible to vote for the Mayor of London. (The postal situation isn't unique to the UK - the Kentucky Bend has a postal address of Tiptonville, Tennessee.) As I said this isn't just a postal problem - Surrey County Cricket Club operates on the historic counties (as do other clubs) and so not only Sutton but also Vauxhall (where the station proclaims it to be "the home of Surrey cricket" despite not even having a Surrey postal address) are within their bounds. So does "Surrey" stop at the border of jurisdiction between Surrey County Council and the Greater London Authority (excluding both Sutton and Vauxhall), stop at the point were postal addresses historically stopped saying "Surrey" (including Sutton but excluding Vauxhall) or go all the way up to the "Surrey Bank" of the River Thames (including both)?
With regards "areas outside the counties", I think this is a reflection of the confusion as the popular definition of a county gets even messier when it comes to urban metropolises as frankly counties are rarely used at all for defining somewhere - "Manchester" is sufficient by itself (and whenever I've heard anyone ask for where it is "in the North" is the most common response!) and "Greater Manchester" feels more like a "city" than a "county" in so far as a distinction can be made. Furthermore counties were not required for postal addresses in the 110 largest towns so people in Birmingham never needed to think "we're not in Warwickshire anymore, we're in the West Midlands county" as "we're in Birmingham" has always been enough. (And yes "West Midlands" can mean either the county or region.) Local government doesn't use the ceremonial counties, and in the urban areas in question there are no county councils, so it's easy to think there's no county for an area, especially a metropolis on the border of several historic counties.
Hope that either explains it or leaves you as confused as the situation! ;-) Looking at the current naming conventions, it seems they're primarily drawn up with villages/towns/cities in mind so we could rightly ask if they're meant to be applied to describing organisations within them that don't already have part of the location name built in.
One practical example of the county problem is "Sutton High School" - currently that's showing the school my sister went to. But there's also Sutton High Sports College in St Helens in the UK, two Sutton High Schools in the US - [one in Massachusetts] and the other in Nebraska, Sutton District High School in Canada, and that's just in the first ten Google hits for Sutton High School. Frankly none of these can make a claim that "Sutton High" overwhelmingly refers to them. So where do we put my sister's old school? (And it's an independent school so the local education authorities may not be the best recourse.) The website is actually vague on where it is, mainly using just "Sutton", but both the further information page and the Admissions page use "Sutton, Surrey" as the postal address. But neither of these are prominent. And to close a further possibility, it's an independent school, whilst to throw another problem into the mess, this particular "Sutton" can mean both the town, which we have at Sutton, London (because Sutton is a disambiguation page]], and the London Borough of Sutton. Fortunately there's no ambiguity here as the school definitely is in the town!
So do we have:
1). Sutton High School (Surrey)?
2). Sutton High School (London)?
3). Sutton High School (Sutton, London)?
4). Sutton High School (London Borough of Sutton)?
5). Sutton High School (GDST)?
6). Sutton High School (Girls' Day School Trust?
5). & 6). are utterly meaningless to anyone without an idea as to what the GDST is. 3). feels like repetitive overkill, but is in line with the article on the town is. 4). is in line with the borough but feels strange. 1). might reflect where the school thinks it is, but frankly that's only a mailing address. 2). is the metropolis. Timrollpickering 23:19, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I've changed my mind. I think we should run with Any School (Bristol, Bristol, Bristol). <j/k> :-) (Meaning the city called Bristol, in the City of Bristol local government district, in the county of Bristol.) DWaterson 23:27, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I've just spotted an even more horrendous example. There is a St Joseph's Catholic Primary School in Nechells, and a St Joseph's Catholic Primary School in Kings Norton. Both Nechells and Kings Norton are in Birmingham, and both are in the West Midlands (by any definition). Now fortunately, no article currently exists for St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, so whichever gets there first could claim that title without disambiguation, and quite rightly so (in order to avoid preemptive disambig). But clearly the _only_ meaningful disambiguators for those two schools are "Nechells" and "Kings Norton" - which are also the same that Birmingham City Council use on their website - as St Joseph's Catholic Primary School (Nechells, Birmingham, West Midlands) or the shortened St Joseph's Catholic Primary School (Kings Norton, Birmingham) or any combination of the two would have no benefit whatsoever over the first disambiguator alone. Essentially, the problem is one of size - the larger and more populous a place, the greater the risk of ambiguity; and consequently, where that happens, it seems to me that the easiest disambiguator is the smallest and narrowest that can capture it in one word, rather than two or three gradually narrowing it down step by step. Cheers, DWaterson 23:52, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Arbitrary Section Break

That seems to be begging the question. I absolutely agree that the most necessary and least ambiguous part of the location is the villiage, the question is whether something else is necessary. The point of disambiguation isn't so that we can fit in hundreds of articles by nearly the same name but to make the information more accessible. As Victuallers said, we're always going to be able to find a counter-example, UK or otherwise, but we're trying to produce a general guideline with minimal exceptions. Let's please stay on topic so maybe we can get consensus, not just pages of text on the complications of English government. Adam McCormick 00:07, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks TRP for the interesting explanation. The more you look into it all the more complicated it gets. I would have thought it best to use the existing Wikipedia place names in school names. The Wikipedia article on the town of Sutton is actually called Sutton, London, so we should either have Sutton High School (Sutton, London) or Sutton High School (London) if there is only one Sutton High School in London (we currently recommend that the place name should be dropped if it's duplicated in the title). In such a difficult case it's probably best to let the editors of the school article decide for themselves. They could for instance choose to rename the school Sutton High School for Girls to give themselves a unique name. If they insist that the school is in Surrey not London then they should be allowed to choose this option too. I expect that this is a very rare example in any case. Dahliarose 10:31, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
I think you've hit on something there, can we all agree on using the name of the article on the place the school is in to disambiguate? Adam McCormick 14:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Was I being obtuse when I said "Every place in the world that has a wikipedia page has a unique name." ... of course I agree Victuallers 14:45, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
That seems resonable to me. DWaterson 15:12, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
That seems fine by me too. Should this be applied to all countries not just the UK? IF so, some American schools (eg, those in Chicago and New York City) would only have the single location parameter. Dahliarose 15:53, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
[ Editing conflict, but posting anyway even if it is all irrelevant now :) ]
I'm new to this debate, so (hopefully) my contribution will be a refreshing outside perspective rather than just an ignorant interjection. But, having read through all the way through the discussion, it would seem to me that the suggestion that makes the most sense is definitely "School Name (name of Wikipedia article on village/town/city/London borough)". For schools which are between settlements, just use the placename they most associate with.
Though for the sake of common sense, flexibility should be stressed. e.g. when repetition can be avoided without confusion, it should be.
i.e.
Sutton High School (London)
Sutton High School (Berkshire)
Sutton High School (Littleport, Cambridgeshire)
not
Sutton High School (London Borough of Sutton)
Sutton High School (Sutton, Berkshire)
Sutton High School (Littleport, Cambridgeshire)
However, consider the Lancaster School. If the Wikipedia pagename for Lancaster were used it would be Lancaster School (Lancaster, Lancashire). And that's just silly. Hence:
Lancaster School (Lancaster)
Lancaster School (Leicester)
Because in this case the repetition is unavoidable without becoming very ambiguous.
I don't see why the wiki pagename suggestion shouldn't be implemented internationally - it would provide a unique, easily generated name for almost every case. If no Wikipedia article exists for the school's location, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) could just be used.
My thoughts anyway - feel free to explain why I'm wrong! (chgallen 17:11, 18 July 2007 (UTC))
We've already agreed, I think, not to repeat place names if possible so that last example would be Lancaster School (Lancashire). I think this will work and then this project won't have to deal with naming at all beyond repetition issues, we can let those who contribute to the city articles deal with all that. And applying it internationally just makes all of our lives that much simpler. Adam McCormick 18:18, 18 July 2007 (UTC)


Sorry to come in at this late stage and throw a spanner in the works, but I've changed my mind a little. Consider this hypothetical case:

St George's School (Littleton, Hampshire)
St George's School (Newton, Derbyshire)

Why should each school have to have their county? Even if the village articles do, that's just to differentiate between villages with the same name. In this case, if this was the only St George's School in any Littleton anywhere, the county name just adds extra long-winded-ness which goes against Wikipedia naming policy. Now a real example:

Marlborough School (Woodstock, Oxfordshire) (under new proposal)
Marlborough School (Los Angeles, California)

It just feels pointless. The locations are there to differentiate, not to give locational information. Why couldn't they be

Marlborough School (Woodstock)
Marlborough School (Los Angeles)

Which differentiates just fine. So, my preferred wording for the policy would be:

  • The general form of a school article title is: [[School Name]]
  • If a school name is not unique, the article title should be disambiguated
  • The general form for a disambiguated school article title is: [[School Name (Village/Town/City)]].
  • If two or more identically named schools are located in identically named municipalities, the location should be disambiguated with the unique name of the municipality as found on the settlement's wikipedia article according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements).
  • In certain cases, parts of the unique settlement name may be omitted to avoid repetition, so long this does not result in ambiguity.

It's long-winded, but that's what I'd ideally like. Anyone else agree, or am I spouting rubbish? (chgallen 12:44, 19 July 2007 (UTC))

My problem with that suggestion is that, while it makes the names unique, it doesn't disambiguate them, if Woodstock isn't enough to distinguish the city on wikipedia, then it isn't enough to distinguish a school in Woodstock on Wikipedia. Not to mention that "Woodstock" to anyone in america was a festival, in Bethel, New York, not a city on Oxfordshire. It just isn't enough. Adam McCormick 14:40, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
I realise that it isn't enough to disambiguate the village, but it should be more than enough to disambiguate the school. Were the purpose of the disambiguation to tell the reader exactly where the school was located then I would agree with you. Woodstock, in that case, would not be enough and Woodstock, Oxfordshire would be preferable. But you can't separate the school name and the location - they work together. I'd imagine the chances of a reader genuinely thinking "Marlborough School (Woodstock)" meaning anything other than the Marlborough School in a place called Woodstock (especially on the disambiguation page, where not only would it be right next to Marlborough School (Los Angeles) and Marlborough School (Aukland), but it would also have a qualifier briefly describing the school) is very low.
The point of the disambiguation is not so that the school's location can be exactly inferred from it's title (you can't do that with un-disambiguated school article titles) but to remove any ambiguity over what the subject of the article is. I can honestly say that there is no ambiguity whatsoever in "Marlborough School (Woodstock)" because there is no other Marlborough School in a different Woodstock. You could not get to the article looking for a different school (or even a festival), because there is no way the title could apply to anything other than its subject. (chgallen 15:17, 19 July 2007 (UTC))
I tend to agree with Chgallen on this point and he's explained it in a much better way than I did higher up this page. The article titles are only supposed to provide sufficient information to identify them in a unique way, not provide full location details. (If this logic is followed through to its full conclusion we'd have to retitle Guildford Grammar School as Guildford Grammar School (Perth) so that people didn't think the school was in Guildford, Surrey.) The Sutton High School example was a different matter because there were a number of Sutton High Schools in places called Sutton, so the additional parameter is necessary. You'd have to know that there was a school called Marlborough School in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in the first place to find the article. The disambiguation pages are the ones which should include the full information about location. (As a point of minor interest I never used to know that there was a place called Woodstock in America and always thought that the festival was held in Woodstock, Oxfordshire! I couldn't understand why anyone would want to hold the festival in such a small place!) Dahliarose 15:38, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
I can agree that in a lot of cases a villiage name is enough for someone who already knows the exact location of the school, but what about someone who only has a vague idea that there is a Marlborough School somewhere in the UK or only knows about one of the Woodstocks in South Africa. Are we saying that they now have to know that there's a town called Woodstock in Oxfordshire? Saying the school is in Woodstock is only useful to those already familiar with the school, but not to the average reader. Adam McCormick 16:58, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
According to WP:D, the disambiguation page should say something like
Marlborough school may refer to:
I don't see the problem. This is the simplest solution: it generates unique page names with no confusion, and it's easy to enforce because most editors who have not read this page would do it like this anyway. (chgallen 17:29, 19 July 2007 (UTC))
Because most editors don't do it consistently, we've had one school placed under four different names at once before. And "most" pages, especially in america, default to (city, State) because it's what we're used to. Besides, WP:D says nothing of the what location parameter should be, only that there should be one, the closest thing it describes is country-based for musical intruments. I've looked at literally thousands of these school articles and I can tell you there is nothing that "most" of them do. The entire point of this guideline is to set a standard not just try to define a system around the patchwork, pell-mell naming that's going on right now. Part of the point was to specifically define how a school should be named if it needed disambiguations. Using the article on the place as a guideline still seems to be the most-supported solution and in my oppinion the easiest to implement across Wikipedia School articles.Adam McCormick 18:04, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean that WP:D supported me in the naming dispute, I meant that it says that disambiguation pages should have a brief description after each link. So the argument that it won't be clear which Woodstock is referred to doesn't hold water, it will be described in the disambiguation page and the article itself. So long as there are no other Marlborough Schools in other Woodstocks then it doesn't matter which Woodstock is referred to, all that matters is that it can be distinguished from other Marlborough Schools by virtue of the fact it is the only one located in a village called Woodstock.
Unless we can come to an agreement, I would suggest we set up a poll, and heavily advertise it around Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools in order to actually see what "most" editors would prefer. We could offer the two options with a brief description of their pros and cons and let people indicate which they prefer. At the moment there are too few contributors to come to a real consensus, so it would be good to get a broader view. chgallen 19:01, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Well there was agreement, to which you yourself voiced agreement less than a day ago. But go ahead and set up a poll consistency v. brevity and we'll see who wants which, cause honestly I don't care anymore. Adam McCormick 19:13, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
The agreement was perhaps a little hasty and we hadn't realised the implications. We are just going round and round in circles. Most people will name their articles without even looking at this guideline. It doesn't really matter whether a school is named Marlborough School (Woodstock, Oxfordshire) or Marlborough School (Woodstock). The important thing is that people should be able to find the school they're looking for. The problem is in most cases that people don't do redirects for all the possible spellings and don't add the schools to the appropriate disambiguation pages. I've just spent some time updating the Marlborough (disambiguation), Marlborough School (disambiguation) and Marlboro (disambiguation) pages to make sure that there are appropriate links to all six schools with Marlborough/Marlboro in their name, and that Marlboro College and Marlborough College are linked by hatnotes (one was and the other wasn't). It might not be possible to have a consistent format for all countries. We need a wider input, and a poll is an excellent idea. The American schools have always been the main problem. I suspect the best solution is to have the format City, State for schools in the US and possibly Canada, which tends to be the normal practice in those countries anyway (perhaps without the state for large cities whose Wiki pages don't require the extra parameter). As I've already argued many times before the double parameter is unnatural and seems completely unnecessary for European schools. Dahliarose 20:51, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Another Arbitrary Section Break

Yeah, you make very good points Dahliarose and well done for sorting those pages out. You are right, it really doesn't matter about the Marlborough Schools. And Adam McCormick, I'm sorry for pissing you off. Really - unintentional. Its sad if it's come to the point where you cause someone to lose the will to contribute to a discussion over something so small.

It's not brevity for the sake of brevity I'm promoting. The problem is that in Britain at least, it's unheard of for a city to be referred of as, e.g. Lincoln, Lincolnshire. It's not that it's rare - it honestly never happens unless there is a direct need for comparison between two identically named places.

Perhaps the best solution is for countries to be split into two groups: those that use the two parameter location (U.S., Canada, Australia, etc.) and those that don't. But we can ask that in the poll.

Again, sorry for being infuriating. chgallen 21:38, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

But it's rather common in America for Los Angeles to be referred to as Los Angeles, California. And really, we've got a big problem with ambiguous place names in England--that's what happens when you colonize. Remember, we've been talking about school names showing up in the article and the disambiguation page, schools are also linked to from a variety of pages--other articles (and there it doesn't provide an explanation of which Woodstock). Often which school is being referred to, or it's location can be figured out through context, but a lot of times it can't. So readers either have to go the article to figure it out, or they have to move their cursor over the piped link and they find out the NAME of the article. Also--think about our category organization, list pages, etc. The NAME of the article is ridiculously important, piping and explanations be damned. Miss Mondegreen talk  22:36, July 19 2007 (UTC)
I do understand that the two-param location is natural and usual in places such as America, Australia, etc.. I also know that the vast majority of people (even in Britain) won't have the foggiest where a village just called "Woodstock" is. But the point I was trying (failing?) to make is that they don't need to, so long as there is no ambiguity over which School is referred to. As we are not trying to disambiguate place names, it doesn't make sense to use place names that seem unnatural.
Woodstock is a bad example though. I would agree that so few people have heard of it that Woodstock, Oxfordshire would be fine (if a little odd). I was trying to come up with a naming system where names like High School (Lancaster, Lancashire) and High School (Lincoln, Lincolnshire) could be avoided - where there is patently no need for the two paramameter name. Maybe (for Britain at least) it's best to say that if you wouldn't put the shire on an envelope (No-one would ever address anything to Lincoln, Lincolnshire), it's alright to leave it off the disambiguation. WP:MS says that if it's an article about something within a certain country, try and use the local language preferences.
What I mean is that even though the article may be Lincoln, Lincolnshire, that is primarily to distinguish between the city and the (Presidential) family name. Other British cities with the same county name tend to keep only to the one parameter, and disambiguate with a hatnote. So the county in this case is ovedisambiguation which is discouraged. So in some cases the use of the article name is inappropriate in some cases, so there should be an exception.
I was earlier advocating using one parameter, unless two were needed. Now I'd advocate using the article name, unless it is natural and unambiguous to reduce it. How about that? Maybe we can get this done with now.  :) chgallen 09:20, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
My point was, is that there may not be ambiguity as to which school is being referred to on the disambiguation page or the article page, but there may be on other article pages. If you read a block of text and it refers to a school that you don't know about or that has a common name, one way to find out is to click and go to the article, but one thing that many readers do is to just hover their cursor over the link so they see the article name, unpiped. That tells them more, like where it is. And when looking through categories, there's again, just the article name, no additional text providing and explanation of which woodstock.
Actually, what I think we should do is create a system just for England, or the UK. That is partially what the task force is for--to create more detailed guidelines for smaller areas. That way we can just say, for the UK, please see ______.
I was talking about the dish, ratatouille the other day and a young girl corrected me and told me it was the name of a movie. And there are people in the world for whom Paris is not a place or a mythological character but a tabloid star. Now we shouldn't disambiguate towards that little knowledge of the world, but if the following two articles were in the same category, how many people would know which one was in Georgia and which one was in Georgia?
[[Tbilisi State Medical University (Tbilisi, Georgia)]]
[[Valdosta State University (Valdosta, Georgia)]]
Now, given our disambiguation guidelines one might be disambiguated with only one parameter--but the average reader, or even writer isn't going to know the guidelines while using Wikipedia. So I don't think that this would provide much clarification:
[[Tbilisi State Medical University (Georgia)]]
[[Valdosta State University (Valdosta, Georgia)]]
Especially when one is looking at only one of those without the other there as comparison.
But, I also agree that (Redhill, Surrey, England) is ridiculously long disambiguation. So, how about this? Miss Mondegreen talk  11:24, July 20 2007 (UTC)

ambiguity, take 1

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name tries to balance three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the title short. These three concerns are prioritized in exactly that order. For example: [[School Name (Redhill)]] does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.


[[School name (Redhill, South Australia)]] works perfectly.


[[School name (Redhill, Surrey)]] does not. Surrey is not a unique name either.

Here, the lowest level of disambiguation (in this case, the town) is dropped, to avoid the overlong disambiguation of (Redhill, Surrey, England). The disambiguated form becomes:

[[School name (Surrey, England)]]

However, if there are two schools within Surrey, England with this name and the town disambiguation is needed to distinguish between the schools, the full form of disambiguation is used:

[[School name (Redhill, Surrey, England)]]

That seems utterly perfect. I strongly support that proposal. chgallen 11:33, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Cool. Now can the UK just be single parameter very local (town, village, whatever) except for when it's unambiguous or is there other weird stuff going on there? The previous comments lend me to believe other weird stuff. Do we need a guideline for weird issues specific to the UK and how to deal with them?
Also, we already have something in place that says drop the place name if it's in the article name. Now I'm not going to bother to find a real example for this, but let's say that there's [[Banbury High School (Banbury)]]--it doesn't need to be disambiguated any further--as far as I know, and for the purpose of this example, Banbury is a unique place name. But there's also a [[Banbury High School (Vancouver, British Columbia)]]
Because there are two Banbury High Schools, the Banbury cannot simply be dropped, even though it is entirely repetitive--that leaves the article without any disambiguation something that we only use when one school is particularly well known. In this scenario, neither are well known enough for this. Do we want to just go with repetition, or do we want to go one space out--Banbury High School (Oxfordshire)?
And is anyone at all impressed that I can keep thinking up these wacky exceptions? Miss Mondegreen talk  11:52, July 20 2007 (UTC)
I think in that case I would want to repeat, it keeps it simple and unambiguous.
The main thing with the UK is that counties are hardly ever used for their respective county towns (mainly because they have such similar names), e.g. Leicester, Leicestershire. It would be like saying New York City, New York. For the UK, just go with whatever the article title says, excluding certain exceptions. But it doesn't need inclusion in the main guidlines - it's just a minor exception. (chgallen 12:23, 20 July 2007 (UTC))
I am however betting that naturally, this occurred anyway--because when naming the article, naming it with such repetition must have seemed silly. Miss Mondegreen talk  12:41, July 20 2007 (UTC)

ambiguity, take 2

On rereading your box, I've just realised I was a little hasty in my desire to get this sorted. My main problem:

"Surrey" may be ambiguous, but "Redhill, Surrey" is not. The community approved Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) think "Redhill, Surrey" is fine for the location - I don't think it's our place to further disambiguate it in relation to a school. So I would have:

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name tries to balance three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the title short. These three concerns are prioritized in exactly that order. For example: [[School Name (Redhill)]] does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.


[[School name (Redhill, South Australia)]] works perfectly.


If in doubt as the to the level of specification required, use the title of the Wikipedia article on the respective settlement. However, there are always exceptions to the rules. If the guidelines result in an unnecessarily long-winded or unnatural title, it may be better change it, so long as no ambiguity is created.


Use community consensus, local naming practice, and common sense to decide upon a title that adequately disambiguates, without becoming overlong.

However, if this suggestion just leads to going round and round again then I'd be happy to retract it. Maybe we should see what the broader community think? Get some input from the disambiguating project, etc. (chgallen 12:31, 20 July 2007 (UTC))

When would using the title of a place create an unnecessarily long-winded disambiguation? I see your point about Redhill, Surrey. But, we would consider Redhill enough for disambiguation in the first place were it unique. Surrey is there to make Redhill unambiguous. That's not the case with Valdosta. Valdosta is not considered enough for disambiguation. Georgia isn't there to make it unambiguous, it's required. Therefore, in this scenario wouldn't we disambiguate (Valdosta, Georgia, United States)? The last required parameter is presumably specific to some extent and known to some extent (though to what extent in each case varies given naming conventions (settlements).
So the question is, is our guideline taking the naming conventions settlements guideline and saying that further, whatever the last parameter is, it must be unambiguous, or that further, the place name disambiguated to must not be ambiguous? The former requires ambiguous place name parameters added in several scenarios, the lattershould mean that as soon as we get to two parameters, the place name is no longer ambiguous and therefore needs to further disambiguation (capping the issue at two parameters). That's the question. Either way, I think that middle block of text is unnecessary and confusing. Miss Mondegreen talk  12:58, July 20 2007 (UTC)
Yes, agree it is unnecessary and confusing. Sorry - I'm not being helpful. I think we are saying that the full place name (not the last parameter) disambiguated to must not be ambiguous, so de-facto capping it at 2 parameters (or whatever the naming conventions for settlements advise).

ambiguity, take 3

How about this, then:

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name tries to balance three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the title short. These three concerns are prioritized in exactly that order. For example: [[School Name (Redhill)]] does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.


[[School name (Redhill, South Australia)]] works perfectly.


If in doubt as the to the level of specification required, use the title of the Wikipedia article on the respective settlement.


There are always a few exceptions to the rules. Use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong.

chgallen 13:20, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

treading warily

Chgallen ... tick K.I.S.S.. Two "Redhill, Surrey"s? No that is not allowed. a) Wikipedia (or any other database) will not allow teo identical article names b) There is a disambiguation policy for placenames.

There may, in reality, be 47 Redhills in Surrey. And seven Surreys in England, and three of those have villages called Surrey in them - But they will all have different article names. Luckily we do not need to solve that problen. We have the most productive people I know from the schools project involved in this debate. Come on! Lets DO something. Victuallers 13:39, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Doing Something

Straw poll. All in favour of this:

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name tries to balance three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the title short. These three concerns are prioritized in exactly that order. For example: [[School Name (Redhill)]] does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.


[[School name (Redhill, South Australia)]] works perfectly.


Use the title of the Wikipedia article on the respective settlement to find out how the location should be disambiguated.


Use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong.

But while acknowledging a very few exceptions (e.g. county towns may omit the county, if no ambiguity is created). Anyone in favour of applying this? It's basically what we were all agreed on earlier, before I wound everyone up with talk of Lancaster. (chgallen 13:54, 20 July 2007 (UTC))

Before we have a straw poll I'd just like to raise a few more points. The above is mostly fine by me, but I think the first section should be amended as this situation should surely only apply if we have two schools with identical names, which also have identically named ambiguous place names in which case we would recommend: the format Sutton High School (Sutton, London) and Sutton High School (Sutton, Massachusetts). I agree that we should follow the article names. The Valdosta article is named Valdosta, Georgia, not Valdosta, Georgia, United States. I therefore see no reason to name a school High School (Valdosta, Georgia, United States). I think it might be best too if we use real school title examples. There's probably no need to disambiguate any of the UK schools in Redhill as they more than likely all have unique names. There only seem to be two secondary schools in Redhill, Surrey. There is St. Bede's School which is a unique name and there is The Warwick School which doesn't yet have an article but which is also a unique name. If there was another St Bede's School then it would surely be sufficient to have St. Bede's School (Redhill) and St. Bede's School (Cambridge) regardless of the fact that there are multiple Redhills and multiple places called Cambridge. It would be a different matter if there was also a Redhill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts for instance. There is a school called Redhill School in South Africa but this title doesn't tell us which Redhill it is in, so why should it be any different if we put the location in brackets? There is also a Redhill School in Arnold, Nottinghamshire, which presumably would become Redhill School (Arnold).
The disambiguation page for Bedford High School provides some interesting examples. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, has very sensibly chosen to name itself Bedford High School (England). There is only one place called Bedford in England so you have a short simple title which is easy to link to.
You have to allow for exceptions too. There are a number of schools like The King's School, Canterbury where the place is part of the official name and there would be much protesting if we were to barge in and change the name to The King's School (Canterbury) or The King's School (Canterbury, Kent). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dahliarose (talk • contribs)
The last sentence allows for consensus to make exceptions in individual case. I think this is a strong addition but that the paragraph explaination needs to be edited to be a little more explicit Adam McCormick 14:32, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

5th Time Lucky? (will find real examples when the wording is agreed on) (chgallen 14:39, 20 July 2007 (UTC))

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. Use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong. [[Unique School Name]] is preferred.


[[Ambiguous School Name (New York City)]] works perfectly. There is no other New York City with which the reader could get confused.


[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill)]] could be confusing, as it does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in. [[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill, South Australia)]] is preferred.


Use the title of the Wikipedia article on the respective settlement to find out how the location should be disambiguated.

Where the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is preferred.


However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.

I like that but I'd like to see "Use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong." put back in. Adam McCormick 14:50, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
It is, I just moved it to the left. Was it better where it was originally? (chgallen 14:51, 20 July 2007 (UTC))
No, it's fine, I just can't read apparently Adam McCormick 15:20, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Good Lord! Are we actually all agreed on something!? ...again :D chgallen 15:31, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
The new wording seems fine as it is not too prescriptive and allows for local variations and common sense exceptions. Are we finally there? Dahliarose 19:17, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I think so, unless there are any objections. I think we should officially propose this new version, and advertise it on the Wikiproject. A week should be long enough. If there are no objections within that time frame, I think we can call this decided. And we can start editing the page to reflect the new policy. chgallen 21:18, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Done something ... a beer anyone? Victuallers 23:23, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
The Barnstar of Diligence
I'd like to give everyone who's participated in the creation of this gideline, this barnstar for collective patience and effort. To chgallen, Camaron1, Dahliarose, DWaterson, Miss Mondegreen, and Victuallers, I solute you. Adam McCormick 03:58, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Ambiguity, take 4

Problem 1: According to this new system, a school in Guildford would require no further disambiguation. Even though, Guildford is an ambiguous place name.

Problem 2:

"Use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong."

Well, then why create a guideline that tackles this at all? Just have a guideline that regulates formatting and sends people elsewhere. The whole idea is to create a guideline that's easy for the average editor to deal with, and the other guidelines aren't so easy to deal with. The settlements guideline--I find it complicated--and with the language "local conventions", we're opening the door for anyone who disagrees with the settlements guideline or the naming of any article to edit war. Let's settle on the school guideline part and we've got major areas blocked out and can recommend people to the settlements guidelines for other areas. But KISS--saying use consensus, convention and common sense is not only complicated, but it's not a real guideline, especially in cases where someone's writing an article--it just leaves the door open for them to choose a title Miss Mondegreen talk  09:34, July 21 2007 (UTC)

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name balances three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the article title for being overlong or repetitive.
[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill)]] does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in. Redhill is an ambiguous place name.


[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill, Surrey)]] works. While Surrey is an ambiguous place name, (Redhill, Surrey) is not. There are many Redhills and many Surreys, but only one Redhill, Surrey.

Where the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is preferred.


However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.

Going round in circles

If you make the guideline too rigid and prescriptive there will be no hope whatsoever of reaching any form of consensus. There are always going to be exceptions which won't conform to any guideline we come up with. Let's put the looser agreed version to public vote and see what the reaction is. We can't keep going round in circles. I suggest we expand some of the specific country sections in the guideline (and especially for the US) where we can spell out the preferred format for each English-speaking country. Regarding the Guildford question, the school name Guildford Grammar School is itself ambiguous. When I first came across this school I thought it was in Guildford, Surrey, but it's in Perth, Western Australia. However, the school name is unique and it is much easier to find the school and link to it with the short name without any location qualifiers. It doesn't matter that the page title Guildford Grammar School doesn't tell us which Guildford the school is in and I don't see that it matters either that a title such as St Peter's School (Guildford) doesn't tell you which Guildford it's in. It only becomes a problem if there are two schools called St Peter's School, which are both in places called Guildford. In all these cases the most important thing is that people can find the school they're looking for. The key is to make sure that all the schools are correctly listed on all the appropriate disambiguation pages, eg, the Guildford (disambiguation) page, the St Peter's page and the St Peter's School page. In the vast majority of cases this doesn't seem to be happening. (I sorted out a whole load of schools yesterday with St Bede in their name which hadn't been correctly listed and redirected. I dread to think how many more schools there are named after saints, kings, etc, which haven't been done properly in this way.) This is what we need to focus on. Otherwise we'll end up with St Peters School (Guildford) and St. Peter's School (Guildford), two 'unique' names which could end up as two independent articles relating to the same school or two articles relating to completely different schools. Dahliarose 11:34, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

OK--I agree with everything you say--and that's why my new suggestion stops disambiguation as soon as the place name is unique--no redhill, surrey, england, no georgia, united states. But having a guidelines that lacks any real guidance--no rigidity at all, just pointers of where to go for guidance, that's not help. It's passing the buck and at the same time taking responsibility for something--if we're going to pass the buck, we might as well absolve ourselves of the whole issue and say that we're not touching it and direct people to other guidelines.
And we don't want school article tiles to be dependent on other article titles either. For starters, there are often debates within a group of articles, moving a disambiguation page, renaming a series of articles and we don't want our articles to be affected by that stuff, which happens on such a regular basis. Second, it opens school articles up to being affected by debates regarding the prominence of cities, where disambiguation pages for places should be located--we want our system similar, and based on the same systems, but not dependent. We have to set up our own rules and guidance at some point, or there's no point. Miss Mondegreen talk  12:11, July 21 2007 (UTC)
I give up. I've got better things to do with my time than constantly argue the same points over and over again. Dahliarose 13:09, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
I think that we should propose the guideline even if it is "Not specific enough" then we at least have an agreed on guideline that we can point to, then we can continue this debate to add more to the guideline, to make it more complete and concrete. It just seems like we need a starting block to build from instead of a lot of proposals that we can't agree upon. I know that this isn't complete as it is now, but it is more likely to be supported than if we call for sweeping change. Adam McCormick 16:17, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
I agree. Also, if the naming conventions are too complicated for people to understand all we have to do is provide a few examples. Examples are easier to understand than rules. Dahliarose 17:20, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
Not sure we are going to do anything. A system which uses locations but is not dependant on the system developed by people who know about locations implies that we can do better. We are unlikely to do that. Victuallers 20:06, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
Not, not that we can do better, just that we don't want to be a house of cards. Personally, I'm missing the real disagreement. Naming conventions settlements says for this place use this level of government, for this place, go local, for this place, do this--we follow that, obviously--it's already written into the guideline. And there's a task force set up, if not yet running to provide more intricate instructions--for example the Canada Education project provides additional naming details for problems that people are likely to encounter there--for examples, French names, etc. We need to base this on the settlements system already in place. But there's a difference between basing it on the system (following where to use town, where to use state, where to use whatever) and following article names. Guidelines change--but major changes that require tons of articles to be rewritten are rare. But small local disputes about is the most prominent place of an ambiguous place name should be disambiguated and the disambiguated page moved to its local location--that happens all the time. We don't want to have to be constantly checking articles and renaming when they do and back when a content dispute has shifted--nor do we want to say name after the article and ignore changes--you can easily be caught naming something after an odd move. The first 200 articles in Category:Ambiguous place names gets you to AL. That's a LOT of ambiguous place names--and a lot of schools in those places. We don't want to be caught up in those page disputes.
How different is our system? Not very. Out of all of the places that share a name, only one can be undisambiguated, and only then if community consensus has placed a disambiguated page at (disambiguation) instead. So for those schools, we're adding one extra parameter--that some will never need and that some may definitely. It's a simpler solution then sometimes disambiguate, sometimes don't, and it avoids the problems that occur whenever a place article gets moved. Other than that, how are the two proposals different? Becomes I'm seriously confused. The objections to the my proposal, if they are that are statements I fully agree with and that I think the proposal does as well. Is it wording? Because, you know, that can be changed. Miss Mondegreen talk  13:11, July 22 2007 (UTC)

Look, these are very minor disagreements in the grand scheme of things, and they really shouldn't get in the way of proposing this guideline. I understand your point about the article names of places sometimes being incorrect, but that's the exception to the rule. Unfortunatley, the rule covers so many articles, that there are many exceptions. How about:

When the school's name is unique, the article title should be the name of the school [[Unique School Name]] is preferred.
When the name of the school is not identifiably unique, the school's location must be used to disambiguate. Use Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements). Almost all of the time, the name of the article on the respective settlement is best.


[[Ambiguous School Name (New York City)]] works perfectly. There is no other New York City with which the reader could get confused.


[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill)]] could be confusing, as it does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in. [[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill, South Australia)]] is preferred.

When the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is preferred.


However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.

Then, underneath, we put "There are always some exceptions to the rules. In these rare cases, use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong." Now are there any major problems with this? (chgallen 14:51, 22 July 2007 (UTC))

I'm happy with the latest version. I think we are all probably agreed on the main issues, but it's a question of getting the wording right. The guideline has more chance of succeeding if we use gentler phrasing such as 'is preferred'. I think it's also very important to keep the bit about local conventions and community consensus. The guideline also works better with a non-UK example as very few UK schools in practice will require the additional parameter. (If you look at the ambiguous educational institutional articles they virtually all have "high school" in their name somewhere and so the vast majority will be in North America.) There are far more people working on all the place name articles than there are on the school guidelines and these people will inevitably have thrashed out all the possible arguments. If they decide that Minneapolis doesn't require a qualifier then I don't see why we should inflict one. Equally if Minneapolis changes to Minneapolis, Minnesota then I'm sure it would be a simple matter to sort it all out with a bot. Certainly from a UK point of view, if you keep the place names short and simple they are less likely to require changing as the boundaries keep changing so much anyway. For example, Bristol has been in Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Avon over the years. Now it is both a city and a county in its own right. Dahliarose 17:49, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
No major problems, but a few questions/minor problems.
Can I ask why we moved away from recommending two parameters for the US? This seems to me to be a separate issue--one was how to deal with ambiguous place names (follow article titles or to add a parameter), and somehow this additional change got added in and no one explained why. I'm not really familiar with why we chose to do two parameters in other places, but the US and Canada often follow the two parameter structure already, and I'm particularly worried about the US which doesn't have the best system set up for places---especially when we get to small places they tend more often to be ambiguous--and they are less likely to have a Wikipedia article yet.
I would prefer however to go back to the Surrey example--or to some other example where the second city is ambiguous as well--and restore the language about further disambiguation not being necessary.
I think the language about using the naming settlements guideline here is confusing. It's earlier in the guideline. Maybe this reminder should go into the text for the ambiguous school name example. But adding something here that talks about choosing the first parameter when the example is referring to how to deal with adding a second place parameter---it's confusing.
The language "Almost all of the time, the name of the article on the respective settlement is best" I dislike very much. If we're going to say this, then we should explain when it isn't (cases when an ambiguous place isn't disambiguated because the disambiguation page is, cases where the ambiguous place name is and we don't need to). If we really think people need to have it spelled out that they go a level up--then we should spell it out. I don't think it needs spelling out, but if it does, the spelling out shouldn't cause further confusion.
Also, once this goes in, we'll have accumulated quite a section on what to do in the case of ambiguous place names. I think we should write a text section above that outlines in which cases ambiguous place names are likely to be problems, and then includes the text part "there are always some exceptions to these rules". The example section is supposed to be an overview and I think introducing a slightly complex topic into it by way of examples isn't the best idea. Miss Mondegreen talk  09:47, July 23 2007 (UTC)
We've listed like five separate examples now, which is madness, especially given that there isn't much difference between a lot of them. I'm copying it into a section--to be worked on by all. This will take forever otherwise. Miss Mondegreen talk  10:02, July 23 2007 (UTC)
We never moved away from recommending two parameters for the US. That's what Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) instructs. And it will be in our policy as well. New York city is a special case - it should definitely not by New York City, New York. If you want, we can change the example to Paris. As for the Surrey thing, if you insist then fine. We can remove the "Almost all of the time, the name of the article on the respective settlement is best" if you really want, but I honestly believe that removing it will result in more ambiguous disambiguations than if it were left in. chgallen 10:24, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

to be guideline

Unique school article title

When the school's name is unique, the article title should be the name of the school. 		[[Unique School Name]]
Disambiguated school article title

When the name of the school is not identifiably unique, the school's location must be used to disambiguate. 		[[School Name (location)]]

Use Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) in conjuncture with this guideline to select the appropriate location. Location may be one or two parameters.
Example of two articles with the same official school name. When only two articles share the same name, no disambiguation page is created. Instead, disambiguation is done solely with top links (also called hatnotes). [[New English School (Jordan)]]
For the school of the same name in Jabriya, Kuwait, see New English School (Kuwait).

[[New English School (Kuwait)]]
For the school of the same name in Amman, Jordan, see New English School (Jordan).
Example of multiple articles with the same official school name. When multiple articles share a name, a disambiguation page is created at [[School name]]. The disambiguation page should always include full details of the schools' locations, including country. [[John F. Kennedy High School (Montgomery County, Maryland)]]
[[John F. Kennedy High School (Tumon)]]
[[John F. Kennedy High School (Montreal, Quebec)]]

The disambiguation page would be located at:
[[John F. Kennedy High School]].
Example of an exceptional case: multiple schools with the same name, one very well known. In this case, the well known school does not have a disambiguated name, and so the disambiguation page is located at [[School name (disambiguation)]]. [[Marist College]]
For other schools with the same name, see Marist College (disambiguation).

[[Marist College (Athlone)]]
For other schools with the same name, see Marist College (disambiguation).

Ambiguous place names

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name balances three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the article title for being overlong or repetitive.


[[Ambiguous School Name (Jackfield)]] works perfectly. There is no other Jackfield with which the reader could get confused.
[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill)]] requires further disambiguation; it does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.

[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill, Surrey)]] is preferred. While Surrey is an ambiguous place name, (Redhill, Surrey) is not. There are many Redhills and many Surreys, but only one Redhill, Surrey.

When the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is preferred.


However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.

Ok--this is just a try--I've cobbled together things from the various tries on the talk page with things from the current guideline. As the current guideline still says two parameters for the Us, Canada and Australia, and no one has said anything about amending that except by way of example, I've left the municipality, state/region as it currently stands and I replaced New York city with a random town in England. Makes changes, suggestions, whatever--also, keep in mind that when this is put in, it won't be exactly like this. The first two sections will replace that first two sections right now, and the ambiguity parts will go at the bottom, replacing our current ambiguity part. So these will be divided unless we decide to reorganize the section as well. Miss Mondegreen talk  10:24, July 23 2007 (UTC)

I think this is even more confusing. The whole point about the double parameters is that they are on the whole only used for place names in North America. For Europe, Africa and now Australia (see below) the single parameter is the preferred option. This is all in line (apart from Australia) with the naming settlements conventions. Also, as I've argued before, the terminology municipality, state/region is meaningless as these terms are not used very much outside North America and terms like state/region could get interpreted in all sorts of different ways depending on local usage. New York City was perhaps a misleading example as it is an exception to the US school disambiguation rule. Perhaps we should use a European school article as an example instead. Dahliarose 10:37, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
I have to agree. It was simpler and easier to follow before. chgallen 10:56, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Erm--this is what it was before--in the discussion of changing it, the disambiguation section wasn't brought up for discussion, so I just copied it over from the article. I've changed it--tell me what you think. I did switch away from New York City to a European town, but I chose a random tiny one, so people may want to replace it with another. Other than that, we need to find a new example for "if a school is in two places at once", we need to craft language instructing people to follow country conventions for parenthesis if they contradict--and unless there are any other problems, are we good to go?Miss Mondegreen talk  09:34, July 24 2007 (UTC)

I added in the other examples we were talking about ambiguity affecting--and a couple others I wanted to change at the same time. So this is currently the most complete version--it includes everything in the article and more--it would completely replace the article examples.

What I've done? I've replaced the Eton College example with Marist College because the real issue is that the disambiguation page is placed elsewhere. I've added a new example for when there are only two article sharing a name. I've changed the John F. Kennedy example both to properly apply to multiple articles, and to include articles from more than the US (though I'm not sure if that parameter should be Tumn or Guam). Miss Mondegreen talk  11:40, July 24 2007 (UTC)

To-do list

work out any kinks/get consensus/implement the "to be guideline" section find a new example to replace rutgers add in language to say that country conventions for parenthesis trump this add in example or change examples/do something to make it clear that all articles should hatnote to disambiguation page answer question: what to do with undisambiguated namespace when there are only two articles (no disambig page) and they are both disambiguated--redirect it to one of them? nothing?

these are minor things guys--and unless people have major problems where we are now (minor stuff can be taken care of), I think we're really close. Miss Mondegreen talk  11:40, July 24 2007 (UTC)

need new school for this example

Rutgers is uniquely named, so we need another school for this example. Miss Mondegreen talk  09:51, July 21 2007 (UTC)

When a school is located across boundaries, and therefore in more than one place, the location information is made more generic. For example, Rutgers University's main campus is located in both Brunswick and Piscataway, so the article would be named [[Rutgers University (New Jersey)]].

Sutton sorted

For what it's worth Sutton High School is now a disambiguation page and the school that was there is now at Sutton High School (London). In the end I followed the location used for Sutton railway station (London). Timrollpickering 14:48, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

That's perfect. Well done. (chgallen 14:53, 22 July 2007 (UTC))
Thank you. That is the most logical solution. One small point, if I've understood the disambiguation guidelines correctly should the page not actually be entitled Sutton High School (disambiguation) or have I misunderstood the instructions? Dahliarose 17:58, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
I think disambiguation pages don't have (disambiguation) after them unless it is to differentiate them from the main, important article named without disambiguation. e.g. Littleton is a disambiguation page without the parenthesis, but Newton (disambiguation) requires them due to the article on the physical quantity not being disambiguated. chgallen 18:11, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. That does make sense. It's not very clear at all on the disambiguation guideline. I did recently create a St Paul's School (disambiguation) page, but I think in this case there is an overwhelming case to change the current St Paul's School (London) to St Paul's School as it is so well known and all the alumni link there. At least I will know for next time! Dahliarose 11:20, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Australian naming

Just noticed the proposed Australian names section on this. First observation is that it is complete overkill from a disambig perspective - some of these will end up well over half a screen wide, and unnecessarily so - I've seen some frightening examples of school disambiguation in the Melbourne area in the past and have spent ages untangling them. Also, if a school is in a suburb but more identified with a city, I can see all manner of wars over which location it is in (we have some tendentious editors who claim their suburb is not part of the city that it's in and would be determined enough to create POV forks). Some of that even wanders into WP:NOT territory. At present we seem to have agreed within the Australian project that school or school, city is acceptable, and it's worked in the places where it has been implemented. Brackets in the Australian project would be confusing as they're used for a very specific purpose - land features (rivers, mountains etc) - which a school clearly is not. Roads, which also pertain to a city and often need disambiguation, are currently in the same format as schools. Orderinchaos 06:07, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your input. Some countries seem to prefer brackets and others prefer commas, so I would have thought it would be possible to specify that the comma format should be used for Australian schools. However, I have noticed that quite a few schools in Australia have put the place name in parentheses. Following our latest discussions the city, state format would in fact be unnecessary for most Australian schools anyway and we're also suggesting that local conventions should be followed which would permit regional variations. (The main page hasn't yet been changed to reflect the latest discussions.) Sometimes I think it will be necessary to use the state as the disambiguator. There are currently a number of schools in the world called Richmond High School in places called Richmond. The two Australian schools are currently titled:

To avoid the repetition of the place name (as we're currently recommending) and in view of the Australian preference for the comma format these schools should presumably now be titled:

  • '''[[Richmond High School, New South Wales]]'''
  • '''[[Richmond High School, Victoria]]'''

Could you and your Australian colleagues perhaps suggest the wording which should be used in the Australian section? Dahliarose 08:21, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Can you provide a link to the thing about brackets being used for a specific purpose and that schools should NOT use them? I find that interesting as it hasn't been my experience in the Australian schools I've come across. At any rate, that's easily handled. We can write in something that says if a country's naming conventions recommend not using brackets, because they aren't used within the country or are used for other specific purposes, follow the country's guidelines.
Also, currently for Australia we're recommending town/city--which should give leeway I'd imagine. And if that's not enough for some articles, the beginning expressly states "it is not set in stone and should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception", and to be fair, this is a guideline. We'd welcome additional input, especially if you think there's a systemic problem--because it being a guideline and the text at the top--every article should not be an exception. Miss Mondegreen talk  09:59, July 23 2007 (UTC)

Starting afresh

I'm getting very confused with all these versions, especially when they get changed midway through the discussion. Miss Mondegreen's latest version is still confusing. The whole point about including the suggestion to follow the article name was to avoid all these confusing explanations about ambiguous place names. The place names have already been decided by the experts I suggest the following (I haven't got time to work out all the fancy formatting):

  • Unique school article – School Name
  • Disambiguated school article – Ambiguous School Name (Location). When the name of the school is not identifiably unique, the school's location must be used to disambiguate. Use the appropriate country location format as shown in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) in conjunction with this guideline. The location may be one or two parameters depending on country preferences. In most cases the article title of the respective place name will be the best indicator as to the parameters required. Forest School must be disambiguated because it is not a unique school name. There is a school of this name in Walthamstow, London, England, so the school has been named Forest School (Walthamstow) in line with the naming of the town article. Similarly Lakeland High School must be disambiguated because it is not a unique school name. There is a school of this name in White Lake Township, Michigan, United States. The school has therefore been named Lakeland High School (White Lake Township, Michigan) in line with the naming of the township article.
  • Avoiding repetition. When the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat.
    Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. Bedford High School (England) is preferred. However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.
  • There are always some exceptions to the rules. In these rare cases, use community consensus, local conventions, and common sense to decide upon a title that fully disambiguates, without becoming overlong.

Commentary

That seems to sum up the general trend of the discussion nicely. Adam McCormick 12:44, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I agree chgallen 12:55, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

We all seem to be working on this in different places at the same time! Can we perhaps incorporate my suggestions above in Miss Mondegreen's overview and then put it all in a new section below so that we can see where we've got to. My proposed wording above gets over the problem of the ambiguous place names. I think the Bedford High School is also perhaps a bad example as there will be very few UK schools which would only require disambiguation by country in this way. Perhaps Sutton High School (London) might be a better example. The place in Guam is actually called Tumon and I've now corrected this.Dahliarose 13:04, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Fresh Attempt

As requested:

When the school's name is unique, the article title should be the name of the school. [[Unique School Name]]
When the name of the school is not unique, the school's location must be used to disambiguate. Use Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) in conjunction with this guideline. The location may be one or two parameters depending on country preferences. In most cases the article title of the respective place name will be the best indicator as to the parameters required.


Forest School must be disambiguated because it is not a unique school name. A school of this name is located in Walthamstow, London, England. This school should be named [[Forest School (Walthamstow)]] in line with the naming of the town article.

Similarly, Lakeland High School must be disambiguated because it is not a unique school name. A school of this name is located in White Lake Township, Michigan, United States. The school should be named [[Lakeland High School (White Lake Township, Michigan)]] in line with the naming of the township article.

When the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is preferred.


However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.

Example of two articles with the same official school name. When only two articles share the same name, no disambiguation page is created. Instead, disambiguation is done solely with top links (also called hatnotes). [[New English School (Amman)]]
For the school of the same name in Jabriya, Kuwait, see New English School (Jabriya).

[[New English School (Jabriya)]]
For the school of the same name in Amman, Jordan, see New English School (Amman).
Example of multiple articles with the same official school name. When multiple articles share a name, a disambiguation page is created at [[School name]]. The disambiguation page should always include full details of the schools' locations, including country. [[John F. Kennedy High School (San Antonio, Texas)]]
[[John F. Kennedy High School (Tumon, Guam)]]
[[John F. Kennedy High School (Montreal, Quebec)]]

The disambiguation page would be located at:
[[John F. Kennedy High School]].
Example of an exceptional case: multiple schools with the same name, one very well known. In this case, the well known school does not have a disambiguated name. The disambiguation page would be located at [[School Name (disambiguation)]] [[Marist College]]
For other schools with the same name, see Marist College (disambiguation).

[[Marist College (Athlone)]]
For other schools with the same name, see Marist College (disambiguation).

Are we there yet? chgallen 13:23, 24 July 2007 (UTC) (edit conflict)

what did I write? oooh, shoot, I forgot that the bedford or sutton or whatever example can't just replace the lakewood one--the lakewood one is about dropping one parameter, not switching which one we use. also, I don't see the problem with bedford--it emphasizes the ridiculousness of repetition, and if there isn't that much, there isn't that much. but if there's a lot of repition and we use an example with little, people might be hesitant about going so far as to disambiguate by country
I think chgallen's right--the examples are getting really confusing. how about using the text that you just wrote (unformatted) as the basis for a section explaining ambiguous place names--all of the examples have had text explaining them above--so that the overview really was just an overview, a reminder, a visualization, showing how the complexities worked themselves out
Also, unless anyone has any objections--let's delete the marist/eton example. all it's illustrating is that the disambiguation page is named (disambiguation) and we don't need a visualization for that.
If we can move the majority of the text to a text section, so that the examples are reminding and clarifying, not introducing and explaining, I think that will really help. Miss Mondegreen talk  13:31, July 24 2007 (UTC)
are we there yet? no--this has just given me an enormous headache--look, we explain the ideas once in the article--this is just for visualization. let's move the text out of the table into a section for ambiguous place names and make this readable and simple again. also--guidelines are easier to understand and remember when a point is made more than once--this will not only help readability, but it will help users remember Miss Mondegreen talk  13:31, July 24 2007 (UTC)
I think we might finally be there. I've just corrected some minor typos. I think we have sufficient examples to show the differences. I don't think we want to mention anything about ambiguous place names in this guideline at all. Those are for other people to sort out. We're just using the format which has already been decided elsewhere by consensus. I think we might perhaps need more detailed explanatory text for each English-speaking country. By the way I've now put the bit about 'local conventions and community consensus' in the intro section of the main article, which seemed to be the most logical place for it. Dahliarose 13:51, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. I'm going to go lie down now... chgallen 13:59, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

A try at text

Right-o--her'es a first whack at the text I was talking about. Miss Mondegreen talk  14:18, July 24 2007 (UTC)

Seems a bit too wordy with too many single sentence paragraphs, I like the suggestion a few sections above as it is very concise but adequately descriptive. Adam McCormick 14:35, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Ambiguous place names

When the name of a school is not identifiably unique, the school's location is used to disambiguate. Likewise, when the school's location is not unique, it's location is used to disambiguate.

[[Ambiguous School Name (Jackfield)]] works perfectly. There is no other Jackfield with which the reader could get confused.

[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill)]] requires further disambiguation; it does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.

[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill, Surrey)]] is preferred. While Surrey is an ambiguous place name, (Redhill, Surrey) is not. There are many Redhills and many Surreys, but only one Redhill, Surrey.

The need for further disambiguation should only happen with articles where the naming conventions (settlements) guideline specify disambiguating using one parameter. All articles disambiguated to two parameters should be specific. There may however, be rare exceptions.

The need for further disambiguation is also necessary when there are multiple schools that share the same name, in the same place. This is not likely to happen when disambiguating to towns or even cities, but sometimes the naming conventions (settlements) guideline dictates disambiguating by country.

Repetitive article names

Repetitive article names should be avoided. This means modifying the location parameter; article titles get repetitive when a disambiguated school is named after it's location. When the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat.

Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. But [[Bedford High School (Bedford)]], and [[Bedford High School (Bedfordshire)]] are repetitive. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is the preferred article name.

However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the school in Bedford with the school in a different city.

This applies to schools that are disambiguated with two parameters, either because the settlements guideline prefers so, or because the first parameter was ambiguous and had to be further disambiguated, but it applies differently.

Instead of simply selecting more general, less repetitive parameters (state, country instead of city, state), the repetitive parameter (general the first, more specific parameter) is dropped. [[Sutton High School]] located in Sutton, Nebraska is not disambiguated [[Sutton High School (Sutton, Nebraska)]], but simply, [[Sutton High School (Nebraska)]] (unless there is another Sutton High School in Nebraska).

[[Sutton High School]], located in Sutton, London, would normally be disambiguated [[Sutton High School (Sutton, London)]], because Sutton is an ambiguous name. As this is overly repetitive and as there is no other Sutton High School in London, the article is located at Sutton High School (London).

kiss chart

Unique school article title

When the school's name is unique, the article title should be the name of the school. 		[[Unique School Name]]
Disambiguated school article title

When the name of the school is not identifiably unique, the school's location must be used to disambiguate. 		[[School Name (location)]]

Use Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements) in conjuncture with this guideline to select the appropriate location. Location may be one or two parameters.
When only two articles share the same name, no disambiguation page is created. Disambiguation is done solely with top links (or hatnotes).
 [[New English School (Jordan)]]
For the school of the same name in Jabriya, Kuwait, see New English School (Kuwait).

[[New English School (Kuwait)]]
For the school of the same name in Amman, Jordan, see New English School (Jordan).
When three or more articles share a name, a disambiguation page is created at [[School name]], and the articles link there instead of to each other. The disambiguation page should always include full details of the schools' locations, including country. [[John F. Kennedy High School (San Antonio, Texas)]]
For other schools with the same name, see John F. Kennedy High School.

[[John F. Kennedy High School]] -- disambiguation page.
Ambiguous place names

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added. The disambiguated article name balances three issues, disambiguating the school, disambiguating the location and keeping the article title for being overlong or repetitive.


[[Ambiguous School Name (Jackfield)]] works perfectly. There is no other Jackfield with which the reader could get confused.


[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill)]] requires further disambiguation; it does not tell you which Redhill the school is located in.

[[Ambiguous School Name (Redhill, Surrey)]] is preferred. While Surrey is an ambiguous place name, (Redhill, Surrey) is not. There are many Redhills and many Surreys, but only one Redhill, Surrey.

When the location is given in the school's name, but the school's name is not unique, disambiguate with the most specific location parameter which does not repeat. Bedford High School in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England must be disambiguated because it is not a unique name. [[Bedford High School (England)]] is preferred.

For articles which use the two parameter form, like Lakewood High School located in Lakewood, Ohio, repetition is avoided by dropping the repetitive location, generally the first and more specific.

However, if there were more than one Bedford High School in England, or more than one Lakewood High School in Ohio then the repetition would be accepted in order to differentiate the schools in Bedford and Lakewood respectively.

is this kiss enough? if not, hack at it some more? i'm going to eat Miss Mondegreen talk  14:50, July 24 2007 (UTC)

What is a kiss chart? Why do we need another chart which is different from the one which I thought we'd already agreed above. I thought we'd already made the point that we don't want to get involved with ambiguous place names. The article on Redhill in Surrey is named Redhill, Surrey. You check the article name and it's decided for you. That seems simple enough to me and much easier to understand than lots of complicated text. The decision has already been made for us by people who know about these things. Why complicate things? The Lakewood High School could perhaps be incorporated in the existing overview but I don't see any need for this unnecessary and confusing Kiss chart. Dahliarose 15:31, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree with Dahliarose, Adam M, and chgallen. I'm not sure why anyone would seek to needlessly complicate and confuse this rather than go with the apparent consensus.--Epeefleche 22:48, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

(editconflict)

you just agreed with three other people who rarely all agree, and since you didn't bother to mention anything specific (just personally attack me), I don't know what you're talking about ). further we're discussing a bunch of things, so many balls are in the air, that even though I've been here for all of this, started writing this guideline, I still get lost sometimes.
I've watched every user change their mind (including myself), apparent consensus go and come back and as soon as an issue was decided be rehashed, and so that's a little rich--especially since you came here after repeated disputes with me and accusing me of wikistalking you. I don't have a problem with you going through my edits and following me--not if you find the articles I edit interesting and have something to contribute. if all you have to contribute is to attack me, nonsensically at that (no one can agree with themselves for more than two minutes on this page--it's like a bad Jew joke), then I'm going to ask you to leave me alone please.
regardless of whether it's me or another editor you're dealing with or just a random page, you're going to need to learn how to talk about content without making it personal. "why anyone would seek to needlessly complicate and confuse this rather than go with the apparent consensus"? You can say that "x makes this needlessly complicated, y is much simpler and seems to have consensus"--that leaves me out of your comment, that leaves an assumption on my motives and behavior out, and I'd actually know what you were talking about.
I've warned you about personal attacks before epeefleche, and I'm really willing to assume good faith here--I'm guessing it's a personality quirk, perhaps you don't even realize when you're doing it. so before you post a comment next time, try reading it first and see if you're using the reader to make you're point or if you're discussing only content. try rephrasing the reply without the reader's prescence--no you, no "anyone"--maybe this will help Miss Mondegreen talk  11:42, July 25 2007 (UTC)
kiss--keep is simple stupid. i don't know which of the multitudes of charts you're referring to. whether or not we tell people to look to article titles or to do x, y, z, we're dealing with ambiguous place names--we're just dealing with them in different ways.
look--I've made the case for not using the article title a number of times, and I don't know why we keep flip-flopping. in addition to the fact that it's just not as consistent, local naming stuff changes--someone proposes moving the disambiguation page to or away from (disambiguation). we don't want our system to be dependent on place name article titles--we're trying to avoid lots of renaming down the line. the whole idea behind this guideline was to organize and prevent the need to be constantly moving article...do we really want to tell people to name an article based on something as dynamic as the name of another article? plus, there isn't any standarization then. some ambiguous place names would by disambiguated and some wouldn't, depending entirely on the current name of the article on wikipedia.
it seems to me much easier to say disambiguate if ambiguous--this will probably be the same as the name of the article (though not always), and in cases where the place duplicates the name...
at any rate, that wasn't the big difference between the version i did just now and the previous ones. the big difference was that I took out some unecessary examples and text and tried to pare it down, though I think it still needs major triming. we should keep it simple, not assume that the user is
when we got into proposing examples and proposing changes to examples, a some of the stuff overlapped with stuff currently in the guideline, which is why I copied that stuff over and tried to incorporate what i perceived to be the ongoing changes, and then things got progressively more and more complicated. unless we're looking at putting something in in the near future (and I don't see that happening right now), I'm going to suggest that we worry about how to write the examples latter and first make some concrete decisions about what this guideline says. I think either users are confused, or annoyed or something--but every time we come to an agreement on one thing and try to move forward and it fails, we seem to take two steps back and whatever issue was just discussed and agreed upon is rehashed once more. people have changed their opinions and we've had the same discussions over and over so many times I don't know whether I'm coming or going. so maybe we should archive this stuff and go through the guideline and the talk page and see where people stand--ask a question about an issue, if it's straightforward move on, if not discuss it briefly, hash it out, come to an agreement and move on--if we have a concrete list of what we agree upon that needs to be in the guideline, writing this should be easier. Miss Mondegreen talk  11:42, July 25 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree with Dahliarose, Adam M, and chgallen on the substantive areas in which they have reached consensus through discussion, which are reflected throughout their page (the UK issues and others, but there are so many I will not waste time reiterating them all here). I also agree with Dahliarose that she is engaged, in discussion with you on this page, into arguing "the same points over and over again." And with others that your contributions here have been needlessly wordy and complicated. And with your above comment that you "still get lost sometimes" Hopefully that clarifies matters a bit for you. As far as your "you're going to need to learn" comment, it does leave me wondering whether there might be a perhaps less officious manner in which you might communicate. I would think, btw, that the above rant is not helpful in any event to the discussion of the substantive issues. I ask only that you become a force for consensus, simplification, and clarification. That would be helpful, and quite possible a welcome change.--Epeefleche 15:13, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
  • While I agree that many of the contributions above, mine not least of them, have been verbose, your contribution seems to be limited to disagreeing with MIss M on every point possible. You have to admit that after as heated discussion as that on your talk page was, this looks suspicious and a little rude. In context of your past interactions, the comments you have made here seem like personal attacks not an attempt at concensus. Adam McCormick 16:19, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Being bold

I have decided to be bold and go ahead with the overview box which was agreed by consensus. It's easier to have something on the main page to work with as it was getting very confusing have so many different boxes on the talk page. I've also gone ahead and put in explanatory sections for the main English-speaking countries which I hope summarises what we agreed. If it's wrong feel free to amend or discuss further here. I'm a bit concerned that we've had no input from any of our Canadian colleagues. Dahliarose 11:19, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

This section was meant all along to be an overview section. The guideline introduces the various parts etc, and the overview provides visual examples. Unfortunately, as we started writing an introducing more guideline and we had some parts written beofre others, we sometimes just wrote an example and introducing the part of the guideline there. The new section wiped out parts that had been written already, thereby removing them from the guideline--it also had sections that were unecessary, enormous blocks of unecessary text and was completely out of order.
This is what I meant in my comment above--when we keep rewriting the examples, we don't seem to know where we stand. For example one time we rewrite them and the US has is using single parameters, a change in the guideline, not just in the examples. And then, no it turns out that we really didn't want to change that in the guideline.
My specific problems with this set of examples are as follows, in no particular order:
  • marist college example/unique example
    • this is the same as the hatnote example, except that the disambiguation page is located at (dsiambiguation). this example provides no new information and should be removed
  • john f kennedy example
    • Guam should be one parameter not two. also, this is again too much text (IMO). I'd trimmed it down in my version also taken care of--replaced with two/three hatnote example--not sure if it will stick around though Miss Mondegreen talk  12:20, July 25 2007 (UTC)
  • name of the school is not unique...
    • overkill. first, why only england and the us? second, if someone has read all the way through the guideline and still needs it spelled out, theres no point. this is very hard to read and kills the point of an overview. the way i'd done it had been by slightly modifying the way it was done--keeping the unique example, modifying the disambiguation example and then two examples--one for only two articles (the hatnote example), and one for three or more (regular example). if this seems to long, this can be cut--i'd recommend cutting the disambiguation example or the three or more example. or finding another way of doing this. but this didn't work
  • order
    • the order hops all over the place and makes this difficult and confusing
  • removal of lakewood high school
    • this is a different example than bedford which says to use a different parameter--this example says to drop a parameter and since nothing on ambiguous place names is covered elsewhere, the examples are the guideline right now. the dropping of duplicate names is crucial in a lot of areas, editors from australia raised it as an issue as have other editors--in fact, this has been a key element in making this work. I combined it with the bedford high example in order to not have two examples--we could do that or have two or something else, but removing it I see as a crucial mistake taken care of Miss Mondegreen talk  12:14, July 25 2007 (UTC)
I'd corrected these issues in my versions of the examples, but since I was met with such harsh ciriticism and this version was put in instead, I didn't feel comfortable making those changes. Likewise, the issues were significant enough (especially the removal of guideline), that I don't feel comfortable leaving this in. Miss Mondegreen talk  12:10, July 25 2007 (UTC)
I don't understand what you were saying. You put most of these examples in so are you now saying that you've changed your mind? Can you perhaps explain in a sentence rather than long paragraphs what you mean? If you don't like an example give us another one. My understanding was that we had all agreed to use the naming conventions (settlements) format. According to this format US schools still have the double parameter. The only thing that's changed is that large cities don't. I think you're finding problems that don't exist. Nobody removed Lakewood High School. You didn't include it in the previous version, so if you want to put it back then do so. I've no idea what the format should be for a school in Guam so take this example out. The UK and US examples are there to show that some countries require one parameter and some require two. Dahliarose 12:32, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

This is getting silly

The main page has become an unbelievably bloated way of saying:

"If two schools share a name, add their locations in brackets using WP:NC:CITY."

I'm convinced I could write from scratch a concise, clear explanation of what to do in every scenario to replace what's on the page. If you look at other naming conventions, it's ridiculous that the naming conventions for schools is one of the most complex there is. Always remember: it is not our place to explain how to create disambiguation pages and use hatnotes. WP:D already does that far better than we could. All we need to say is how to name school articles. That's it.

I'm going to have a go at rewriting the page with that in mind in my sandbox when I have a moment. chgallen 12:34, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Done: User:Chgallen/Sandbox. I've tried to abide by the spirit of what we've all agreed on. I have kept in mind that all this page is supposed to do is outline the naming conventions for schools. There are already pages specifically devoted to explaining disambiguation and hat notes. Look at WP:NAME and read some of the other naming convention pages - none of them go into detailed explanations of how to (as well as when and when not to) create disambiguation pages. Simplicity and clarity are the buzzwords. Have a look, tell me what I've done wrong, and then we can start disagreeing about something else. chgallen 10:10, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

In a Nutshell

I think that "If two schools share a name, add their locations in brackets using WP:NC:CITY." is pretty much what it says under - in a nutshell - so at least it isn't lost. I agree the rest is bloated, I think you are "brave" to try and create a rewrite. Victuallers 12:53, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and ironically there 's a lot that isn't in there yet. But remember, the reason we've been working on this is because other naming conventions guidelines aren't getting across to school editors. Remember, a lot of school editors only edit school articles, and even for long-term, committed users--trying to sort out what applies where and when, it's not easy. The idea of a guideline is to make something easy and understandable. And when there are various exceptions for this and this and that, it tends to get bloated, yes.

I also suspect that as stability comes to the guideline, we'll get this pared down quite a bit. Miss Mondegreen talk  13:15, July 25 2007 (UTC)

Questions...

I get why the other definitions were removed, but that unique one should go somewhere. Any ideas?

The guideline states that when only two articles share a name, no disambiguation page--because it's sort of silly. So we have two articles, [[ambiguous school (a)]] and [[ambiguous school (b)]], both with hatnotes that point to each other. Great, right? What happens to space [[ambiguous school]]? It's not a disambiguation page...does it redirect to one of the two articles? Does it just do nothing, assuming that people will use the search feature? Miss Mondegreen talk  13:15, July 25 2007 (UTC)

In my understanding, there's nothing at WP:DISAMBIG that prevents a disambiguation page being created for two topics which need disambiguation, as opposed to three or more. In addition, a disambiguation page allows for an easy update from [[ambiguous school (a)]] and [[ambiguous school (b)]] to [[ambiguous school (a)]], [[ambiguous school (b)]], and [[ambiguous school (c)]] in case another school with the same name has an article written about it. shoy 20:54, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
What seems to happen is that School A creates an article entitled Ambiguous School. School B comes along and finds the name space Ambiguous School is taken, so School B becomes Ambiguous School (Location). This is what has happened in the case of the two New English Schools. The one in Kuwait is simply called New English School and the other one is called New English School (Jordan). I'm not sure if it's worth renaming the original New English School in this case as presumably then it would be necessary to create a new disambiguation page, which seems unnecessary unless there are lots of other New English Schools waiting to have articles written about them. Incidentally the school in Jordan is incorrectly named according to our guidelines. It should presumably be New English School (Amman) rather than New English School (Jordan). I wonder if we should for the moment confine our examples to English-speaking countries as we have had no input whatsoever from any of these countries and we could end up recommending something which is against the local convention in that particular country though I can't think of any other examples for the moment. Regarding the dropping of the definition of 'unique', I thought that you and Adam were both keen to have something in the guideline about how to determine if a school is unique. I therefore put in the whole section which Adam had drafted so that it didn't get lost on the talk page so the definition therefore becomes redundant. In view of the criticisms that the page is now too bloated I wonder if this section is necessary after all. Dahliarose 20:56, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Right, but assuming users followed this guideline, especially users who created a lot of school articles, this would happen. Also, I'm seeing a cases where even only one school is disambiguated... At any rate, if we're setting forward a guideline we have to write a system that works not only when people don't follow it, but when they do. If the system only works when they don't follow it...well then, that's Wikipedia :) Miss Mondegreen talk  21:38, July 25 2007 (UTC)
I think it's good precedent to create a disambig page whenever there may be confusion. They're free, after all. shoy 22:54, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
OK fine. We can try recommending it. Whether or not people will put it into practice is another matter! I sorted out King Edward VII School the other night. Two schools had already been added as a hatnote, but then I found a few more on another page, so I've created a new dab page. I think the problem is that school article creators often don't know how to handle all the disambiguation pages and page moves so they leave it for others to sort out. Dahliarose 23:13, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

As long as we're reinventing the wheel

I've been trying to keep the things we've agreed upon straight by writing them down, but yesterday I got lost an so decided to put it all in my sandbox. I've reformatted what we have just a bit and tried to tie it all together, I haven't even attempted to reformat the examples section, but feel free to tell me your thoughts. Adam McCormick 14:23, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the original proposal was getting somewhat bloated and there was a lot of repetition. Your pared down version is much better. Am I right in thinking that the section on "Determining if the name is not unique" is now not required? I don't personally see the need for it but I thought that you and Miss M were keen to have something along these lines. I agree that the history section is completely redundant and should be dropped. I'm not sure what we do about Australia as the only input we've had from Australian editors suggests that they want to use the format Any School, Perth rather than Any School (Perth). I'm not happy about forcing them to use the parentheses format if they've already agreed a different format. Should we perhaps leave out Australia altogether until we get some further input from Australian editors? My concern is that Australia is the first in alphabetical order and people might get confused by an Australian example in the comma format. Somewhere in the disambiguation section we need to have a link to WP:D – perhaps at the beginning highlighting it as the main article. I personally find the official disambiguation page somewhat confusing. I think it helps to have a few examples so that people can then visit the pages and see how it's done. If I do a dab page I always find it easier to copy and paste the format from an existing page. The big question seems to be what to do with all the examples. As fast as we reach agreement it gets changed and it's very difficult to know what we're working on. The overview/example section on the main page has changed considerably since I last saw it and now seems to be more of a guide to disambiguation than to the naming of schools. I thought that the first three sections of the box we had under the heading Fresh Attempt were far clearer than the box which is currently on the main page. The link with naming conventions settlements has now been lost completely and I thought that was what we'd all (or nearly all) agreed on. Perhaps we should have one box for name examples and another box for disambiguation examples. Dahliarose 21:30, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
It's not only the Australians who prefer the use of commas to parentheses; the UK entry in WP:NC:CITY sugggests the same, doesn't it? There are plent of UK schools currently using a comma, anyway. ~ Scribble Monkey 10:38, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Yes, WP:NC:CITY suggests a comma for disambiguating all place names, as do we. For disambiguating school names, (I think) we decided on parentheses for schools because some schools have a comma in their official name (e.g. King's School, Canterbury - check the official website)]] chgallen 12:19, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The King's School, Canterbury obviously decided it was necessary to disambiguate itself before Wikipedia came along. What are the chances of there being another The King's School, Canterbury that would need further clarification? I'm afraid I still can't see why school names should be treated any differently, and it is clear that many editors have followed the settlement names formatting thus far. ~ Scribble Monkey 12:45, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I don't think I explained very well - having looked at the discussion that went into deciding, it seems that the main deciding factor was that a comma made it look as though the location was part of the official name even when it was not.
Consider The King's School disambiguation page. There are schools which are officially named "The Kings School, Location" and others which are simply named "The King's School" and happen to be in a location. If we used a comma (which most have already done, before this was decided on), there would be no telling from the title of the article what the actual name of the school was. The fact is that the various King's Schools which have a city in their name are not disambiguated - they have a unique official name. Otherwise we would have The King's School, Rochester, Kent instead of The King's School, Rochester.
We use location as an arbitrary way of differentiating schools - it would be wrong to give the impression in the title that schools use a name that they don't. I think that was the reasoning anyway. If you want to change the decision you should probably bring it up where it was decided - on the wikiproject first. chgallen 13:25, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I did raise this topic at Wikiproject Architecture to try and establish if there was any overall policy for the naming of buildings. You can see the thread here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Architecture#Disambiguation of building names. There did seem to be a suggestion that the location should be included with a comma only if it's part of the building name. However, in practice it seems to be down to individual preference. Australia and India have mostly opted for the comma. The US have overwhelmingly adopted the brackets. UK schools seem to be a mixture of the two formats. People tend to copy what's been done before so some counties follow one format and others follow a different format. I have to say that the comma looks more aesthetically pleasing in a title, but as so many American schools have already gone for the parentheses it might be easier to go with the flow. Dahliarose 15:33, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
It seems to me that there is no consensus, and that either option is equally valid. Although, I too prefer commas aesthetically. ~ Scribble Monkey 16:02, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
While I agree that the comma looks better in Any School, City I that think that when you have Any School, City, State it begins to look odd. I would tend to follow the Architectural guidelines - the school is more of a building than a settlement. However, it might be a good idea to reopen the discussion there if you feel strongly about it. chgallen 16:09, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

City name needed for U.S. school?

Someone recently moved Summit High School (Oregon) to Summit High School (Bend, Oregon) citing this page. There is only one Summit HS in Oregon and I disagree with the move. This naming conventions page is confusing because it says the naming convention for the qualifier is (City, State), and later there are examples that only have the state. So are you suggesting that all disambiguated U.S. schools always list city and state, or is the guideline only there to show what the naming convention is if further disambiguation is necessary? If the latter is the case, that needs to be cleared up in the examples section or footnoted. And I believe the qualifier should never be the city name alone, correct? Katr67 16:09, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The examples that only use the state are for repeating place names, (If the school were in Summit, OR, not in Bend, OR) Adam McCormick 16:28, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
OK, that needs to be made clearer. So are you saying we have to move a ton of articles at List of high schools in Oregon? That seems unnecessary, but I'm trying to make those articles consistent with each other. So if you indeed have consensus on that part, I'll go along with it. Katr67 16:47, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Most of what we're working on is wording everything more clearly, that part of why this is still "Proposed" Adam McCormick 18:18, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough. You should definitely solicit more feedback from outsiders like me since I haven't been part of the discussion and it wasn't clear to me what you were trying to do. So the way I understand the guideline as it stands now, if the school has the same name as the city and there happens to be another U.S. high school with the same name, then it would be disambiguated as Foosville High School (Foostate). But if the name of the school isn't the same name of the town, then it gets both city and state if in need of disambiguation: Wikipedia High School (Foosville, Foostate). Is that correct? If so I'll go ahead and start moving the Oregon articles, unless you think I should wait until the page is "official"? Thanks for your help. Katr67 18:28, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Yes, and can you please have a look at the edit I made to the oregon list. If the name of the school is the same as the city you drop the city from the disambiguation so we get Huntington High School (Oregon) in Huntington, OR but Mohawk High School (Marcola, Oregon) in Marcola, OR. Adam McCormick 18:36, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

(unindent)Gotcha. But I don't understand why you did this one:

*[[Oakland High School (Oakland, Oregon)|Oakland High School]], [[Oakland, Oregon|Oakland]]

Also, I think its fine to pipe and alphabetize the links by the names the schools are commonly known. (Churchill HS vs. Winston Churchill HS). Unless you have a guideline for that too, I think it should go with local usage. Katr67 19:42, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

That shouldn't have happened. I undid that. However, that school should should be moved to [[Oakland High School (Oregon). One thing we are pretty clear on is that repetitive names are deadly. Miss Mondegreen talk  21:47, July 25 2007 (UTC)
I don't understand your change either. I fixed it to be the way before Alanbly changed it, which was correct according to this guideline. And it doesn't need to be moved because there isn't an article--it's just a redlink. Katr67 22:05, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, the Oakland change was a mistake, I do approve of the piping though. We do have a guideline about naming articles acording to the full official name unless the other is significantly more well known, so the names should match one way or another. Adam McCormick 00:16, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
But we shouldn't pipe in order to correct a rename--people see something that's incorrect, then they're more likely to fix it. Piping doesn't really fix the problem, it just hides it. Miss Mondegreen talk  08:59, July 26 2007 (UTC)
Regarding the US city names, if we're following the settlements naming conventions then large US cities which don't currently have the state in their title (such as New York City, and Chicago) would not have the state included in the school title either, eg, Any School (New York City) NOT Any School (New York City, New York). Is that what we've agreed? If so I think we need to spell it out in the US section (as I did in an earlier version) otherwise people will automatically put in the state. The population of some of these large cities is huge so there are potentially large numbers of schools involved. The whole issue of US naming is something of a can of worms as there is no consensus among American editors as to which cities don't require the state, hence, rather bizarrely, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, California, even though the state seems completely unnecessary.Dahliarose 09:56, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I've made that clear in my proposed rewrite. chgallen 11:08, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Do check proposed rewrite's history - Ive added two changes/improvements P.S. Oh ... and another rewrite below? Victuallers 11:58, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks - you are very right to cut down on the wordiness. I want to make look as simple as it actually is, and pass over all the disambiguation page stuff that no other naming convention bothers with. The problem is that while we continue to argue over every last detail of the proposed wording, the policy page itself has become confusing (or at least, people have been confused by it). And yes... I can tell there are going to be lots of rewrites on the way... Honestly, we really need to come to some agreement for the page soon - it's such a trivial matter really. chgallen 12:14, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

a large rewrite

I've got a good idea for a rewrite which really pars things down without changing things and am going to try and do it tonight. It also includes the things we haven't yet, but keep meaning to on talk like if your country standards dictate something other than parenthesis (Australia) go with that... At any rate, I'll put an in use tag on latter and try and clean things up a bit. So shout out anything on the talk page that you do or don't want done and I'll try and include it--I'm going for cleanliness and understandability. We can work from there, or y'all can just revert me. Miss Mondegreen talk  21:47, July 25 2007 (UTC)

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