Wikidata talk:WikiProject Political geography

France & classification

Hi, I just created a Category:Administrative_division_project category, which aims to regroup everything about administrative divisions. A new project is born: Wikidata:WikiProject France‎‎, in which I added a section about administrative divisions classification which might not be aligned with the recommandations of this project, please take a look before merging the items. TomT0m ^(talk) 16:31, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Political entity labels

There is seems to be some disagreement over how to label some political sub-divisions. Obviously, there are differences in how names are treated in different situations, so no truly universal format needs to be applied, but I do believe we should adopt a basic set of principles to help guide labels and calm label edit conflicts. These guidelines are in line with the general label guidelines of Wikidata. My proposal is that the label of a political-geographic entity should adhere to the following guidelines:

1. The entity's label should as closely as possible reflect the most common general usage in the label's language. (Help:Label#Reflect common usage)
2. Where there is an official name and spelling in the label's language, that name and spelling should be used. Do not use full official titles (e.g. "The State of Washington") unless they are very commonly used in writing about the subject (e.g. "People's Republic of China"). The full name should be added as an alias.
3. Disambiguation portions of a name should be dropped. These are parts of a name that are commonly used to differentiate between entities with the same name, and sametimes may even be capitalized as part of the name in some uses. E.g. "Washington State" may be used sometimes to differentiate vs. Washington DC, or "Georgia State" vs. the country Georgia. Typically, if the format can be either capitalized or not, and can be placed before or after the name (e.g. for Washington, both "Washington state" and "state of Washington" are common constructs), then the disambiguation portion should be dropped from the label. On the other hand, if the portion is nearly exclusively used in one form, is capitalized as part of the proper noun, and is used in all cases, even when no disambiguation is necessary (e.g. US county names), then it should be retained. (Help:Label#Disambiguation information belongs into the description)
4. Location information such as names of other entities the subject is located within should be dropped. Use "Badakhshan" as opposed to "Badakhshan, Afghanistan".
5. The label should be short so it can be used in infoboxes, tables, and other compact locations without adding unnecessary clutter.
6. The label should be able to be comfortably inserted into prose (e.g. "Foo is a province in Afghanistan") if possible.
7. Other forms of the name which are not used as the label should be added as aliases to assist searches.

If these seem feasible, they can be written into the task force guidelines and perhaps referenced on Help:Label. Let me know if maybe some tweaks would be advised. Thanks! Joshbaumgartner (talk) 06:22, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

I would prefer one system for all geographical features, not specific ones for subsets. That also means one capitalization system. In the English Wikipedia capitalization is mostly done according to Chicago Manual of Style. I posted on Help:Label, since my proposal is not specific to political entities. Tamawashi (talk) 17:50, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

I agree with you, Tamawashi (talk), it would be elegant and lovely if there were a universally ued and accepted system to refer to political/geographic/administrative entities. However, such a system is not in use in the world as far as I am aware, as every country defines its own structure and sub-division. It is outside of the scope of Wikidata to create such an authority, but Wikidata does have several guidelines to help label creation and control and as I stated above, they were my primary baseline for the more detailed guidelines I propose above. Joshbaumgartner (talk) 07:18, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

The authority I mentioned is a real world authority and has an item page: The Chicago Manual of Style (Q8020). Even if you are not aware of this: The CMoS is in use. Tamawashi (talk) 11:20, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

 Comment CMoS is not an authority control for naming of political entities. The section you cited merely speaks to capitalization of generic names when included with a proper name for geography when writing English in prose. CMoS does not tell you whether to use "Badakhshan", "Badakhshan Province", or "province of Badakhshan", merely how to capitalize whichever one you choose. It is not an authority control, it is a style guide. Joshbaumgartner (talk) 23:16, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Good example item for a city?

Are there any existing city items that demonstrate best practices for claims? Kaldari (talk) 23:33, 8 October 2014 (UTC)