Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (schools)/Archive 4

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Use of Hatnotes

I have a problem with this part of Wikipedia: Naming conventions (schools)#Choosing a name:

In these cases, if only one other article with a similar name exists, both articles (School Name and School Name (location)) would use hatnotes to link to each other.

This seems to suggest that one should put an unnecessary hatnote on the article with the unambiguous name. This is in direct contradiction to the Manual of Style (Wikipedia:Hatnotes#Disambiguating article names that are not ambiguous).

Also in the main this guideline seems to copy the general guidelines that might be relevant to schools. What unique rules does it include (except the aforementioned one)?

Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _{talk contrib} 17:46, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

The major thing is the format for the Parenthetical parameter so that we don't get Golden High School (Colorado), Golden High School (Colorado, USA), Golden High School (Golden, Colorado), Golden High School (United States), and Golden High School All at the same time. (PS, What is a hatnote?) Adam McCormick 23:39, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Read the guideline Adam!  ;) Hatnotes are another name for top of the page disambiguation...which is what the guideline says should be done in certain cases. Miss Mondegreen talk  08:59, June 27 2007 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't get to you early Joe, I thought I'd replied already :(....

If you accidently get to the article War (band) and you should have been taken to War, you know what went wrong and can not only get to the right article but can fix it. This isn't true with schools. The issue isn't notability in terms of unique, it's that they're both about the same thing--they're both school articles. Links have a propensity to be done wrong, especially when there's so much article moving. If someone gets taken to the wrong school article, if they don't know the subject--they may not know that they're at the wrong article, though something may seem off to them. And if they do know that they are at the wrong article, they may be unsure as to what to do next. Given that school articles that share the same name--whatever their other qualities will always be two school articles, hatlinks should go both ways.

I'm not quite sure about your other question. Can you elaborate? Miss Mondegreen talk  08:59, June 27 2007 (UTC)

Consensus

Do we have consensus that as a pure naming guideline (no preemptive disambiguation) this page is still valid? Adam McCormick 23:21, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

The guideline still calls for preemptive disambiguation:

"If the school name is not unique, the location of each school should be added as a qualifier in parentheses."

"Unique - When there is no other article on Wikipedia with a significantly similar name, and it cannot be reasonably shown that another school with a similar name exists."

*shrugs* I think so. There haven't been any issues raised in awhile--not with the idea of the guideline at any rate. The problem is that we moved the issue of writing a guideline for figuring out if a school is unique, and guidelines for naming (by region)--which were the two contensious issues, to the School naming task force, and no work has been done there. I started it up, but I didn't even publicize it with the other wikiprojects or anything else--I've been busy, and we just don't seem to have a lot of manpower on this issue. Miss Mondegreen talk  04:43, July 2 2007 (UTC)

OK, it's just I disappeared for two weeks so I thought I'd check. I'm going to do some significant rewriting and repose the guideline. I'll be including specific parameter guidelines for the major english population centers so if someone could extend or fix problems with the following list (Please just edit it directly) that would be great:

1. Australia - (City/Villiage, State/Territory) such as "(Perth, Western Australia)"
2. Canada - (Town/City, Province/Territory) such as "(Victoria, British Columbia)"
3. United Kingdom - (Village/Town/City/London borough), eg, Forest School (Winnersh), Forest School (Horsham), Forest School (Manchester), Forest School (Walthamstow)
4. United States - (Municipality, State) such as "(Loveland, Colorado)"

Was unsigned, signing Adam McCormick 23:02, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

I think we all recognise that a guideline is needed. There is consensus that there should be no pre-emptive disambiguation. However, as discussed above there is already an existing guideline which covers the naming of places at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements), and I think we should be following this guideline for school disambiguation. In practice, schools in Australia, Canada and the United States would have the double location as shown above. However, I think UK schools should only have the one location parameter, in accordance with the settlements guideline. UK schools are already disambiguated in this way and I think you will end up with all sorts of problems if you go against current practice and common sense. UK places are not automatically identified by county in everyday usage in the same way that, for example, American places are qualified by the state. I've therefore amended the UK entry above to give the single location parameter. I would have thought that it is highly unlikely that there are two schools of the same name in two different places of the same name in the UK. If further disambiguation is required then the following format should be used:
- School (town/village, county) or School (borough/suburb, city) ,eg, Forest School (Newport, Monmouthshire) or Forest School (Walthamstow, London).
School naming guidelines for other countries need to be worked out on a case by case basis in collaboration with the associated Wikiprojects. Dahliarose 09:15, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

In re filling the paranthesis...

I'm fine with this, except that I think we need to add back in the part about "if the location is not unique". I used Georgia (U.S. state) and Georgia (country) as an example a while back, and I really don't have a good example off of the top of my head, but not all of these place names are unique.

When the name of the location of the school is not identifiably unique, additional location information has to be added.

The guideline had read:

“ [[School Name (Municipality, Georgia]] does not tell you whether the school is in the country of Georgia or the U.S. state.

[[Tbilisi State Medical University (Tbilisi, Georgia)]]

[[Valdosta State University (Valdosta, Georgia, United States)]] ”

Of course, that's a bad example in re the guideline. I'd chosen it specifically for the Georgia part, and both schools are unique, IIRC, and that aside, the examples should read (Georgia) and (Georgia, United States) because both schools are named after their locations.

At any rate, schools in places like Surrey are an exception and should include the country/territory/province in the disambiguated name. Cases like this should be pretty rare. Both the school name and the location name would have to not be unique in order for this to be an issue. Miss Mondegreen talk  11:25, July 2 2007 (UTC)

reply to dahliarose in re disambiguation

Woah...now I'm confused. You're not ok with saying that schools whose names are not unique being pre-emptively disambiguated? I though you were only against non-unique disambiguation.

My two cents on the disambiguation v. naming issue. For starters I think that they're connected. We're now starting to cover naming pretty well but we've barely touched disambiguation.

We have not touched anything other than really simple disambiguation and redirect standards (two or more schools, same name, name without location is disambiguation page, no redirect pages). We don't tell them what to do when it's not standard--where redirect pages are needed, where they're ok and where they're bad because it becomes too easy to link to the wrong article via redirect. And we have no real guidance yet for how to figure out if your school name is unique or if it's not. Some of it needs to be set down in guideline form--is the XXX Academy of the Performing Arts similar enough to the XXX High School to be on the same disambiguation page? Are they too similar for redirects to the disambiguated page name? Or are t=redirects necessary? We've discussed nothing about disambiguation other than pre-emptive, yes or no, and the guideline is seriously lacking for that.

Which is one of the reasons I am uneasy removing the line about pre-emptive. The disambiguation part of the guideline hasn't bee formed at all and has been barely touched in discussion. I'm against making major decisions (I'd switch this back to a proposed tag maybe) when we have so few people discussing this on a regular basis, and when so little of the meat is there. We should be discussing this in context and we aren't. We haven't written the context yet.

The second reason I'm against removing the line about pre-emptive naming is I'm very much for it, and it's one of the main reasons that I restarted the guideline. I've had experience moving pages down the line and it causes real problems. It's an immense amount of work for starters. We don't just need to fix article links, but talk page links (it's not like there's a redirect in most cases), and the talk page links need to be piped so that the discussion looks the way it did before (one more added layer of complications we don't need). And in addition to the fact that doing this is time consuming and hard, there's a lot that can't be done. We can't fix links in histories, off-wiki links, etc. And those are just some of the problems with the links. If we know that there is more than one "Apple Valley High School", even though none of them have articles yet, when writing the first, it should be pre-emptively disambiguated. If we only do this with school names that aren't unique what's the problem?

My one concern is that at the moment, people are left on their own to figure out what unique is. They're left on their own to figure out much of disambiguation and I think we need to fix that. Miss Mondegreen talk  11:25, July 2 2007 (UTC)

You've lost me here. I'm not sure that I quite understand your comments. If a school name is not unique then some form of disambiguation is required. All we're trying to do here is to decide what should go in the brackets in different countries if disambiguation is required. I think Adam is quite right to focus in the first instance on the main English-speaking countries. In any case, America is really the main problem, simply because of the sheer number of schools involved. If we can get America right, we can sort out the other countries later. Surely a Google search is all it takes to establish if a school is unique. I don't quite understand the problem. There can't be many schools now which don't have websites, apart from those in third-world countries which are highly unlikely to have similar names to English-language schools. Dahliarose 23:08, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Eh, I should stop wiki-ing when tired. My first point was that there's a lot that's missing. My second was that you said you were against pre-emptive disambiguation which confused me because I thought you'd said earlier, and your comment now seems to support that you are, as long as we only pre-emptively disambiguated school names which are not unique, which is what the guideline calls for.

Yes in most cases a google search is all that's necessary but we should give some guidance on how to search. The number of people who are search engine inept is quite astounding, and there are specific things people have to think about. One issue is that the more the name is not unique, the more other things will pop up instead--the harder it will be to find alternate schools. For example, University High School--there's not a single unique word there. We also need to write into the guideline how similar names need to be in order to be disambiguated--we mainly deal with indentical names right now, not similar ones.

And yeah, America is the main problem, but my point about non-unique names goes to point there too as I mentioned earlier with Georgia. That's just a generic rule that applies everywhere. The problem is it was removed from the guideline because the examples were bad. I don't care if we put it in using Georgia as the example or Surrey or Surry--we can use anything from the ambiguous place names category. It would be helpful if we could use a real example--two schools that are not unique (therefore require disambiguation) in each of the two places that share a name (requiring further diambiguation). We can obviously use in the example schools that are unique just to show what to do in the event that they were, but I'd prefer not to. Miss Mondegreen talk  02:30, July 3 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that there are very few, if any, schools which have identical school names and identical but ambiguous place names. I'd be interested to know if you can actually find any examples. In any case Surrey is not a problem as the county wouldn't be included for English schools and for the places in America, Canada and Australia, we're already using the municipality, state/province format so there is no confusion. Surrey is also a county in Jamaica but there is currently not a single Jamaican school with an article in Wikipedia. Jamaican schools would in any case be disambiguated by place name rather than county. There are also no school articles on Wikipedia for Georgia. I imagine too that Georgian schools will have distinctive-sounding Russian names and it is pretty unlikely that any will share a name with a school in the American state. Dahliarose 09:06, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Comment: Although I haven't been involved with this discussion, I'd like to weigh in with some comments. I've created a fair number of dab pages for high schools in the US. I've tended to dab schools only with the state as long as there are not multiple schools of the same name in the same state. In the case of "county" high schools—i.e., schools with "County" in the school name—the state by itself is a better dab than the community, which is quite often obscure and sometimes is not an incorporated place or even a post office. — Dale Arnett 20:11, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

The problem is that the state isn't specific enough for a general guideline, and putting a lot of exemptions in just complicates matters. I would also argue that a small school in an unincorporated area may not be notable enough for an article anyway. The point is that every school in the US can be disambiguated using municipality and state and that there are very few for which this wouldn't be enough. Adam McCormick 23:01, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

If you could show a few good examples, we might mention this in the task force. there are going to be obscure exceptions that shouldn't really be dealt with here, but that we could list in the task force Miss Mondegreen talk  21:40, July 4 2007 (UTC)

You may have misunderstood me... I was saying that for many schools in the U.S., especially high schools and even more specifically "county" high schools, the state is enough of a disambiguation without the city being necessary. I agree that elementary and even middle schools are so numerous that the "city, state" dab is probably necessary, but once you get to the high school level, there are noticeably fewer examples of multiple high schools of the same name in the same state. This is especially true for "county" high schools, since there can be only one county/parish of a given name in an individual state (although there can be "directional" high schools—for example, in the state I live in, Bullitt and Oldham Counties have a "Foo County/Central High School" and two schools with the county name and a compass direction). Also, if a school shares its name with the city in which it is located, it normally need only be disambiguated with the state, IMHO—for example, in my state, I believe that Paris High School, Paris, Kentucky could just as easily be rendered as "Paris High School (Kentucky)". That being said, however, I could see the case for uniformity... — Dale Arnett 00:47, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

In the case of county schools, this guideline only calls for the state name as the "municipality" is already part of the school name. Paris High School (Kentucky) is correct Adam McCormick 06:26, 8 July 2007 (UTC)