Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (U.S. schools)

New proposal

Following discussion at WT:NC(S), I have created a new proposal for naming conventions solely for US schools. Hopefully this will allow for consensus to form more easily. The version I have created is a draft and I welcome some input on getting it to guideline status. I am going to alert all relevant WikiProjects and the village pump to this new proposal. WP:NC(S) will remain a separate proposal for now, which will hopefully one day replace this as a guideline. Camaron1 | Chris 17:12, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Disambiguation

It seems a little excessive to use (City, State) if only one disambiguator is needed. I think the order of disambiguation should be:

1. Country
2. State
3. City
4. County (I know there's at least one state in the USA with two towns with the same name)

Thoughts? shoy 19:23, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I think that the full city and state is more uniform, easier to link to and much less ambiguous. The way it's written now is both consistent and easily applied in the vast majority of cases. While there may be two cities with the same name, are there identically named schools in the two identically named cities in the same state? This has also been argued before. Adam McCormick 23:29, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The current (Municipality, State) setup is inherited from WP:NC(S), where it was generally voiced that double disambiguates are the best option for US schools; as it can be easily applied - the problem comes when you try and apply it to schools outside of the US. This proposal might need to be expanded a little for special cases, but the current version is OK for most cases and is simple. Camaron1 | Chris 12:44, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the current proposal is good, but I would clarify that it should be used in all cases where there is obviously likely to be a conflict, not just where one already exists. DGG (talk) 18:34, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

We around the block on that point for a month at the parent guideline. There is significant resistance to any such connotation. Nice though that would be preemptive disambiguation is generally discouraged. Adam McCormick 23:01, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Nearly there?

This proposal has been around for a while, and feedback so far has generally been positive. I do generally think we are not to far away from reaching consensus on what appears to be a non-controversial proposal. Any thoughts? Does anyone have any concerns that need to be addressed? I might bring this back-up again at the village pump and related WikiProjects to generate further discussion so consensus can be reached. Camaron1 | Chris 12:49, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

considering the extremely high amount of possible duplication of school names, I think the possibility of making this an exeption to the prospective conflict guideline might need further discussionDGG (talk) 16:34, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes I agree I think it does and has been brought up before. I deliberately did not include pre-emptive disambiguation into this proposal as in the older version of WP:NC(S) it was a central feature of the proposal to pre-emptivley disambiguate nearly all school articles, which met huge opposition and resulted in the proposal failing. A very limited element of pre-emptive disambiguation might be sensible, such as when it becomes obvious there is going to be a conflict, such as after internet research. Camaron1 | Chris 18:52, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Could someone provide a link to "pre-emptive disambiguation"? I have no idea as to what you are talking about, and a search in Wikipedia yields only 8 entries that do not help much in understanding it's usage here. Thank you, and sorry for my lack of understanding. Dbiel ^(Talk) 17:21, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I didn't at one stage know what it meant either - though fortunately another project provides the answer [1]. It means disambiguating pages (such as adding the location in brackets to the article title) to avoid a article naming conflict on Wikipedia which has not yet occurred, but could happen in the future. Pre-emptive disambiguation can vary from disambiguating all school articles to just a few where a naming conflict looks very likely to occur. Camaron1 | Chris 18:03, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

The guideline looks good to me. I have been spending much of my time working in Category:Education and sub category Category:Schools, try to clean them up. So this guideline is of a great interest to me. I am going to add a new section and hope that it is not out of line. Realizing that votes are never taken, it is still helpful to know how many users are supporting or opposing this guide line. It can also be used to address the issues of individual users who have issues with the guideline.. If it is considered inappropriate, please feel free to delete it. Dbiel ^(Talk) 17:21, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with it, I understand guidelines are not supposed to be passed by counting votes, but I see nothing wrong in using straw polls to find out where people's opinions are, and it has been done for past proposals successfully. I am going to alert relevant WikiProjects and the village pump to allow people to participate. Camaron1 | Chris 18:03, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Without wishing to seem unduly negative, is this guideline necessary? It doesn't actually seem to contain anything specific to US schools, and the only provision which seems to differ from WP:NC is the recommendation to use the official name unless a common name is 'significantly' more well-known (as opposed to the usual rule to use the common name). I would have thought that if such an exception is necessary, room could be found for it in WP:NC.

If this can't reduce to WP:NC, can it reduce to WP:NC(S)? That already seems to contain most of the same content, including some content specific to US schools (and seems to have become inactive largely because of lack of participation, which I'm not sure bodes well for a guideline covering a more limited set of articles.

I'm just wary having watched WP:MOS for a long time and seen a lot of guidelines spun off to their own pages, which in my experience in all but the most pressing of cases largely only results in confusion of precedence, gradually-emerging contradictions between the specific and general guidelines, and lack of oversight of the spun-off guidelines. TSP (talk) 18:47, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Some very valid questions and suggestions. This may help explain why it is being done. This guide line is not intented to be a long term guideline and has the goal of being deleted after the WP:NC(S) guideline is approved. The problem is that we do not currently expect that guideline to be approved in the near future, too many international issues involved. The US schools are a real mess. That is way this guideline is being spun off as a separate guideline. We believe that we have a chance at getting this one approve quickly. Work will continue on the parent guideline, and if or when that is finally approved, this one will become a simple redirect to the parent. There is not need for a separate guideline; but right now, there is no guideline. I hope this helps explain why we feel it is necessary at this time.Dbiel ^(Talk) 18:58, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

This proposal was created after discussion at WT:NC(S), the reasons for it are covered there. In particular see comments under "Is this proposal dead?" and "The de facto standard for everything but populated places is "name (location[, location])". There is hope that a accepted WP:NC(S) will supersede this proposal one day, but that currently stalled by the comma v. brackets debate and the significant variation in school disambiguation practises between countries. Camaron1 | Chris 19:06, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

What sort of mess are the article titles currently in?

It just seems to me that these guidelines are basically just a repetition of WP:NC and WP:DISAMBIG; in which case I would have thought that what is required is not a new guideline, but simply an agreement on the part of the relevant Wikiproject to apply the existing ones. TSP (talk) 19:14, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

They are in a mess. A lot of school use commas and others use varying types of parenthesis in disambiguation. The US generally use double parenthesis, India uses mostly commas, and Australia (with WikiProject Western Australia using only commas) and the UK use both. There is nothing I can find in either WP:NC and WP:DISAMBIGUATION which specifies when to use parenthesis or commas. A WikiProject agreement is simply not workable, there are simply to many relevant WikiProjects that have differing precedents on how to disambiguate, and in the UK and Australia there is simply no agreement. I see nothing wrong with having a specific naming conventions guideline for schools, which will provide guidance on how to name schools correctly while not been generalised, like the main guidelines are. WP:NC(USS) is a start on standardising naming conventions for U.S schools, where there is the highest level of agreement in disambiguation. Camaron1 | Chris 19:46, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

WP:NC already has a section on schools - "When disambiguating a school because an article already exists, the most general locale of the school should be used in parentheses to all articles, and a disambiguation page should be created" - which seems pretty clear. WP:D has "A disambiguating word or phrase can be added in parentheses." - while it doesn't explicitly forbid other disambiguation punctuation, its instruction appears to be to use parentheses.

This guideline doesn't offend me or anything; I'm just always wary about the creation of multiple levels of guidelines which make it hard to find the instructions you should actually be following, and which contain a lot of duplicated material which is likely to fail to be updated if general naming concensus changes. TSP (talk) 20:09, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

If I remember correctly the WP:NC section on schools was created to summarise the original proposal at WP:NC(S), which was basically to disambiguate all schools using parentheses, and it appears to have not changed since that proposal was rejected. In any case, it certainly is not enforced that much, at the present moment if we try it will likely cause uproar. Camaron1 | Chris 21:13, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Guide to help determine consensus

This is only a summary guide to help see where consensus on the issue of the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (U.S. schools) stands; and to clearly see what areas of the guideline are problematic. Please do not explain your reasons in this section. Create a new section heading or join one of the existing sections to discuss the issue. Thank you

Support the proposed guideline

• Dbiel ^(Talk) 17:21, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
• Camaron1 | Chris 18:03, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
• Adam McCormick (talk) 19:22, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
• Wikimania1011 -Talk- 10:22, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Have issues with the proposed guideline

Please include a very short statement to identify the problem area here, then start or join into the discussion of the specific issue in a separate heading

• for the generic names very likely to be duplicated, as "Schools of arts and Sciences", the location should be added initially. Otherwise, the name sounds over broad and is confusing--people expect the articles to deal with schools of arts and sciences in general--and in some cases, that seems to be intended.DGG (talk) 00:22, 22 November 2007 (UTC)