Mjlarochelle

Broadcasting

Latest comment: 17 years ago4 comments1 person in discussion

Exactly what is it that you view as the problem with calling the city of Greater Sudbury by its actual proper name? Bearcat 05:57, 26 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

As I've pointed out in previous iterations of this debate, the city of Greater Sudbury is not divided into a "Sudbury portion" and a "not-Sudbury portion". From my parents' house in Whitefish, I can call friends in Chelmsford, say "Hey, I'm in Sudbury", meaning that I'm sitting in my parents' basement, and not be the least bit misunderstood. The name "Sudbury" does not designate a specific part of the city to the exclusion of other parts. People in the area just don't use "Sudbury" to mean "old city of Sudbury as opposed to Val Caron or Garson"; the word is never used that way. If people need to be more specific than "anywhere in the entire city of Greater Sudbury", they say "Gatchell" or "Minnow Lake" or "Lo-Ellen" or "Copper Cliff" or "New Sudbury", not "Sudbury". You can say "Sudbury" to mean "Sudbury as opposed to North Bay"; you can't say it to mean "old City of Sudbury as opposed to Garson or Skead". It's virtually the same situation that applies in Toronto — while you can still get away with saying "Scarborough", "Etobicoke" or "North York", if you mean the old city of Toronto you have to say something else, not just "Toronto", to actually make it understood what you really mean, because "Toronto" doesn't necessarily convey that you're not standing at the corner of Yonge and Finch.

Furthermore, a radio or television station is always licensed to the official name of the municipality as it exists at the time of licensing, not to a specific community within a municipal boundary. Any differences that exist between CRTC licensing and official municipal names result from usage lags that occur when a municipal name change takes place after the CRTC license is issued, not from any CRTC convention permitting stations to be licensed to a specific community within a municipality.

Plus I find it quite instructive that every single Wikipedia contributor I'm aware of who comes from the Sudbury area has insisted on the usage "Greater Sudbury" — the only objections to it that I've ever seen have come from people who have no connection to the city whatsoever and often don't even know that the municipal amalgamation ever took place.

But the bottom line is that "Sudbury" and "Greater Sudbury" are, for all practical purposes, interchangeable names for the whole thing, not nested entities where the shorter name refers to one specific part, or excludes other parts, of the longer one. Bearcat 00:23, 27 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Oh, and incidentally, most of the "corrections" you listed on my talk page are replacing the actual city of license with the geographical location of the transmitter, which doesn't even approach being the same thing as what I'm talking about. Ottawa has not been amalgamated into Chelsea, Toronto has not been amalgamated into Grimsby, and Vancouver has not been amalgamated into West Van or Capital G. There's a big difference between using the actual name of a station's city of license when that has changed, and replacing the city of license with a transmitter location that's outside the actual boundaries of that city. Bearcat 20:14, 28 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

At some point, Wikipedia has to strike a balance somewhere between common understanding and actual reality — else we'd end up pretending that municipal amalgamations never happened, that Kanata isn't part of Ottawa, that Scarborough isn't part of Toronto, that St. Boniface isn't part of Winnipeg, that Hamilton is part of the Greater Toronto Area, that Cobourg is in Eastern Ontario, and that the easternmost Canadian province is called Newfoundland rather than Newfoundland and Labrador. I disagree with you about where the balance between those two imperatives happens to lie, but you're also right that it's not worth picking a fight about.

But you're still conflating two very distinct issues. I'm not disagreeing with you about the point that people generally say "Sudbury" rather than "Greater Sudbury"; that's quite obviously true. What I'm saying is that unlike "Paris" vs. "Brant", "Sudbury" does not denote one specific community within "Greater Sudbury". Yes, people drop the "Greater" in conversation, but the unmodified name doesn't actually mean anything different than the modified name does. It's a distinction with about as much practical significance as Sheshatshiu vs. Sheshatshit. Bearcat 06:44, 29 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

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