Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (countries)

Erm no. These would be the codes at nearly resulted in my country have .GB as it's top level domain name.Geni 00:53, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

We don't want to have articles at United States of Mexico. The current version at Mexico is just fine. User:Zoe|(talk) 03:20, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

I take it the impetus behind this proposal is something like the suggestion here --Tabor 04:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

I prefer to have articles on countries at the most commonly used name in English and have redirects to that spot from less common names. Naming conventions is about making it easy to find articles, which I believe my preference would accomplish. - Mgm|(talk) 05:48, 18 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I would imagine that for any individual article, if a consensus for a name not recognised in the ISO standard could be developed, then that name could be used, in the same way that any guideline can be deviated from. The point of this is to have a clear fallback position when there is no consensus or an unclear consensus about what the name should be. Having the article at Mexico is not controversial, and so there would be no problem establishing or demonstrating a consensus for that. --bainer (talk) 07:38, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

How many examples are there where the proposed convention is not already followed? Perhaps more directly, what would be the point of this convention? Surely there are Wikipedia articles about every country. Is this a proposal to rename the ones that do not conform? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)


 * This is meant to be a fallback position. The convention to use the ISO standard is qualified by "unless a clear consensus can be established." If editors on a particular page can't agree whether to use one form or another of the name, which happens from time to time, then the convention suggests that the editors simply defer to this widely accepted international standard, until the dispute can be resolved. Within the last month alone it's happened on East Timor and Côte d'Ivoire, after a move was requested on each of those pages. --bainer (talk) 00:04, 20 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm still not sure I understand. All of these countries have articles.  Anyone can request a move to whatever name they'd like, but failing a consensus in favor of the move the article name remains as it is.  How would this convention change anything?  Say there's an article about Foo where Foo isn't the 3166-1 name.  Would adopting this convention mean it should be moved (without going through WP:RM), or would adopting this convention mean a move request to the 3166-1 name would not need consensus, or what (exactly)?  -- Rick Block (talk) 00:55, 20 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the slow reply. Yes, I would think that if the convention was adopted, the articles on countries should be moved, unless a consensus for another name can be shown. In most cases this would be easy to show. The convention is really only designed to affect the difficult pages, and I intended for it to have the effect of putting the onus onto the people who want it at a non-standard name to show exactly why it should be so. --bainer (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
 * So, the intent is that this amounts to a mass renaming outside of WP:RM? As far as I know, adopting new naming conventions doesn't generally affect existing articles - not that it couldn't in this case, but I think the proposal should be very clear about this.  Which specific articles would be affected?  -- Rick Block (talk) 00:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)


 * To the best of my knowledge, it would affect:


 * Falkland Islands &rarr; Falkland Islands (Malvinas) (consensus unclear to me)
 * Iran &rarr; Islamic Republic of Iran (likely to have consensus in favour of current name)
 * Republic of Ireland &rarr; Ireland (consensus unclear for me)
 * North Korea/South Korea &rarr; Democratic People's Republic of Korea/Republic of Korea (consensus unclear; I, for one, would be in favour of the latter)
 * Laos &rarr; Lao People's Democratic Republic (likely to have consensus in favour of current name)
 * Libya &rarr; Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (likely to have consensus in favour of current name)
 * Republic of Macedonia &rarr; Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (consensus unclear to me)
 * Russia &rarr; Russian Federation (consensus unclear to me)
 * Taiwan &rarr; Taiwan, Province of China (consensus very unclear)
 * Tanzania &rarr; United Republic of Tanzania (likely to have consensus in favour of current name)
 * Vietnam &rarr; Viet Nam (consensus unclear; I would be in favour of the latter)
 * That said, I support this proposal. [[Image:European-Austrian flag hybrid.svg|20px]] ナイトスタリオン ✉ 05:48, 9 December 2005 (UTC)