User:Elli/sandbox7

I've collected a list of short descriptions for various subnational entities here. My view, which has some level of consensus, is that these should generally be standardized. Why? The purpose of short descriptions is to effectively serve as disambiguation, for example in searches, and as a brief description of a topic. For U.S. states, for example, the maximal disambiguation is "U.S. state" as is used with Georgia. Therefore, "U.S. state" makes sense as the short description. There's no need to add regions, as there aren't other states to disambiguate between, and adding regions makes it (very slightly) less immediately clear what the article is actually about.

The same idea generally applies for other countries, though the more verbose "$Region of $Country" is usually preferred to "$Country $Region" (e.g. "Province of Canada" is used instead of "Canadian province"). This is just due to the way I found most of these articles to already be at when I started tracking this; no need to change a mostly silent consensus here.

I've noticed that these short descriptions tend to fluctuate over time, but not towards anything particular. It's often caused by people changing the short description on one article that they might come across in their browsing or editing. People changing them generally don't know that the descriptions are standardized nationwide, and usually don't object to that practice once made aware of it. Of course, consensus can always change (and there was not a particular discussion establishing a strong consensus for this practice), but given that most of these changes are drive-by edits, there so far has been no serious effort to change this.