WeRelate talk:Place page titles

Including additional levels in place page titles

Should we change the titles of US place pages from City, State to City, County, State?

For example, should we change the title of the place page for Chicago, Illinois to Chicago, Cook, Illinois, in which case Chicago, Illinois would be a short-cut and would redirect to the longer name?

How this affects you: We've just added place auto-completion to WeRelate. Any time you enter a place in an input field, once you enter the comma, you see a list of all places in the world having that name as a preferred or alternate name. You can then select one of the places in the drop-down list, which makes entering correct place names much easier. Entering correct place names is important because it allows us to geo-code the places, which means that you'll soon be able to see maps of the events in your ancestors' lives. Should the "correct" format for a place name (for a birth event or death event for example) be listed as City, State, or City, County, State?

Arguments For

• In a review of places from 100 randomly-chosen gedcom files. it seems that the around 50% of the places where entered as City, County, State (e.g., Chicago, Cook, Illinois), around 30% of the places were entered as City, State (e.g., Chicago, Illinois), and maybe 15% of the places were entered as City, County with the word County or some abbreviation thereof appended, State (e.g., Chicago, Cook County, State). So City, County, State (e.g., Chicago, Cook, Illinois) seems to be the most popular naming convention among genealogists.

• Genealogy records are often stored at the county level. Seeing the correct county at a glance is a good reminder research possiblities. Including "County" or "Co." as part of the county title may help non-US users.--Lauren 08:28, 16 November 2006 (MST)

• Quite a few cities have the same name as the county. I really dislike seeing a place that I can't tell if it is a city or a county. That's another reason I always include Co, after the county name.--Janiejac 23:38, 8 April 2007 (MDT)

Arguments Against

• The naming convention of City, State is the convention used by Wikipedia, and is the convention most used for non-genealogical activities.

• Currently, when there is more than one city with a specified name located within the state, the cities are made unique by including the county. For example, Place:La Grange, Cook County, Illinois and Place:La Grange, Brown County, Illinois. Only those cities that appear more than once within the state need to have the county name to make them unique; names of other cities can be shorter.

Arguments for another format

• In Canada, placenames are given as "Toronto, Canada". In genealogy we are often dealing with small villages and towns. Yesterday, when I entered "Nairn" - which is the sort of place that is five houses and a mileage limit decrease along a country road - I was impressed that the system immediately recognized it as "Nairn, Middlesex, Ontario, Canada". But then it only displayed it as "Nairn, Canada". Canada is a big place that has a history of westward migration similar to the US. Seeing that someone was born in "Beaconsville, ,Quebec, Canada", married in "Woodstock, Oxford, Ontario, Canada", and died in "Weyburn,, Saskatchewan,Canada" illustrates a much different life than b: "Beaconsville, Canada", m: "Woodstock,Canada" and d: "Weyburn, Canada". The more specific naming is already in the system, so it would be beneficial to use it for the personal info. For sake of space and ease of use, the simpler, truncated versions could be used along the bottom in the category list.

• That's a good point that I hadn't considered. Place-names in the category list need to be the same as place-names in the links though. Should I assume that the benefit of displaying county/district and province in the link outweighs the disadvantage of having longer category names?--Dallan 20:46, 16 November 2006 (MST)

Include Country as the last level for US and Canada?

• Do people want to include USA as the last level of US place-names; e.g., Chicago, Cook, Illinois, USA as the "correct" place name for Chicago? (Most US place-names in GEDCOM files I've looked at don't include ", USA" as the last level.)
• What about Canadian place-names? Would people like to see Canadian place-names ending with ", Canada"?

• Most people anywhere would identify Chicago, Illinois as that big city in the United States, but would be less certain on smaller, less important communities. Country names probably are essential for all placenames, even those within the US. I know that I can't name and place the provincial boundaries in France and Germany and England, so maybe people from outside North America don't automatically assume Vermont or New Hampshire or Virginia is a provincial jurisdiction in the United States. Any of those sound like they can be anywhere settled by English speaking peoples. Many people in the world probably think British Columbia is a located somewhere other than the west coast of Canada. People researching genealogy and looking in a specific area might be slightly better educated, but still, greater specificity on placenames is probably useful and necessary, even if longer names does make display awkward in places. --Tim 08:11, 26 November 2006 (MST)

• I agree with the conclusion that we should "fully qualify" place names, including the country bit. In the US and Canada places that I have sampled, it seems like the place page titles already do include the country. Good! However, I've noticed that the places I've sampled in England and Germany don't include the country (e.g., Place:Nottingham, Nottinghamshire and Place:Frankfurt, Brandenburg). Are we agreed that we're at least striving to evolve to fully qualified place names in all countries? If so, I'll guess we'll just rename all those English and German places as opportunity and volunteers arise? --TomChatt 02:46, 30 December 2006 (MST)

Once we decide which levels to include in place names for England and Germany and other countries (e.g., we probably won't include the "region" in England), we'll write a bot to rename the place pages. We'll definitely include the country. We plan to do this over the next couple of months.--Dallan 22:33, 2 January 2007 (MST)

Format details

It sounds like we've settled on a fully qualified "city, county, state/province, country" for place names, which is handy to read, and nobody need type all that since it's nicely offered in dropdown menus after typing the first bit. A couple of details seem left unresolved:

• is the county simply implied by its position, or are we making it explicit (i.e., "Chicago, Cook, Illinois, USA", or "Chicago, Cook Co., Illinois, USA", or "Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, USA"). I think the first is fine, but just wanted to check.
• is the country "US", "USA", or "United States"? I prefer the shorter versions, which are clear enough, but it seems like most of the places I've been entering lately get shown in the dropdown menus as "..., United States". Tends to make it a bit long and overflow the field.

We used "United States" because that's what is used in Progeny software's World Place Finder and what Ohana software recommended. Regarding county, Progeny includes the word County, but the Family History Library Catalog does not. We chose not to include it in order to make place names shorter.--Dallan 14:24, 29 December 2006 (MST)

On a related note, I think it probably is a good idea to explicitly indicate "county" in some form when creating the Place page that represents the county itself. For example, "Los Angeles County, California, USA" or "Los Angeles (county), California, USA". I'm guessing that the parenthetic form may be more useful to automated matching that may happen down the line, so the "type" component is distinctly punctuated from the "name" component. I think it's probably not a good idea to name the county page simply "Los Angeles, California, USA", as this is too easily confused with the city of the same name that is within (but not the same as) the county. And the city page would be "Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA", right? (That looks funny but it makes sense. And I think that's how things show up in, say, the FHL place index.) --TomChatt 01:47, 29 December 2006 (MST)

I'm torn on this one. Progeny software includes the word County, the Family History Library Catalog doesn't, and I'm told that the new FamilySearch system being developed by the LDS Church won't. We currently don't include the word County on county pages, but we could if enough people preferred. One thing to consider: how are we going to treat counties internationally? That is, if we include the word County in the title for US counties, should we also include it for counties in England, Ireland, etc.?--Dallan 14:24, 29 December 2006 (MST)

I guess my particular concern is for the cases where the county contains a city of the same name (but the county and the city are distinct entities). For example, Los Angeles or San Diego in California, or Fredericksburg or Williamsburg in Virginia. Or Galway and Cork in Ireland. When I see "San Diego, San Diego, California, United States", or "Cork, Cork, Ireland", it looks a bit funny, but there is no ambiguity. On the other hand, if I see "San Diego, California, United States" or "Cork, Ireland", there is too much room for ambiguity as to whether the city or the county is meant. Where I have run into this in Person/Family pages I've entered so far, I have been overriding the Place page title to make it explicit (e.g., "Place:Fredericksburg, Virginia, United States|Fredericksburg Co., Virginia, US"). I would propose including a parenthetical "(county)" in the names of county Place pages, either consistently on all of them, or at least on those where the county name is shared by a contained city.

By the way, in England and Scotland (but not Ireland), the county name often has the suffix "-shire" built in to it, and this is particularly so where there are cities with the same name (Perth/Perthshire, Aberdeen/Aberdeenshire). Thus I don't think we need any special qualification on county names in Great Britain.

I don't think there's any need (for clarity) to identify the county component of a fully-qualified city name. And I'm assuming that there's not any need on the software's part for those two to be identical, is there? To recap, I'm proposing:

• Place:Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, Virginia, United States
• Place:Fredericksburg (county), Virginia, United States
• Place:Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States
• Place:Cook (county), Illinois, United States (or Place:Cook, Illinois, United States?)
• Place:Cork, Cork, Ireland
• Place:Cork (county), Ireland
• Place:Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
• Place:Aberdeenshire, Scotland

I think the county/city name conflict affects a small but noticeable minority of all counties. --TomChatt 00:58, 30 December 2006 (MST)

Disambiguation pages for places?

The county/city with same name issue lead me to another thought. It may be appropriate to have what Wikipedia calls "disambiguation pages" for Places. For example, there may be a page Place:Cork, Ireland which merely states something like: "Cork refers to both to a city and a county in Ireland." and offers links to Place:Cork, Cork, Ireland and Place:Cork (county), Ireland. There would be a template tag explaining that it's a disambuation page and what that means. The tag would also be helpful in culling out the disambiguation page where it's not appropriate (for example, you wouldn't want a place field on a Person or Family record linking to a disambiguation page, and you wouldn't want to offer it as a choice in the drop-down menus).

This may be a useful resource for documenting ambiguity issues. For example, if you're trying to find "Woodend, Aberdeenshire", you don't want to fall into the trap of picking the first one you find. You'd like to quickly be made aware that there are dozens of Woodends (probably one in each parish, and sometimes more than one in each parish), and it's useful to pull together a list of all the Woodends tailored for disambiguation. (Ditto for "Boghead", and I'm sure other places have similarly over-popular names.) The disambiguation page would not only point out that an ambiguity exists, but give appropriate info to help resolve it (e.g., Woodend(1) is the one down by the Forest in the south part of the parish, Woodend(2) is the one in the north part of the parish by the Dee River, etc.). --TomChatt 14:11, 30 December 2006 (MST)

I could write some code to exclude disambiguation pages from the drop-down list if people wanted to have disambiguation pages for places.--Dallan 22:33, 2 January 2007 (MST)

Place name format for UK?

UK places have a couple of unique characteristics that I wonder about.

1. Should we include the place's region in the name of the place?
2. Should we include "United Kingdom" in the name of the place?

For example, should Place:Framlingham, Suffolk become Place:Framlingham, Suffolk, East of England, England, United Kingdom? I'm not sure.--Dallan 21:36, 27 November 2006 (MST)

• Whatever database you're using to differentiate the placenames when searching for the input boxes seems to have the geographical divisions at their most optimum. For example, if I type "Hanbury," into an input box, I'm returned the choice of "Hanbury, Wortchestshire, West Midlands, England" and "Hanbury, Staffordshire, West Midlands, England". All that seems to be enough information, and it's already somewhere in your system. "United Kingdom" doesn't really add anything over just "England" and "Scotland" and "Wales".--Tim 08:42, 28 November 2006 (MST)

No need for "United Kingdom" in the name - there's only one England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the world (and probably only one Staffordshire). Regions are of marginal value because the current ones are a very modern invention, useful for finding current locations of BDM and other records but often unrelated to what those records say about where things happened. For genealogy I suggest using the traditional counties because several centuries' worth of records use those names. (By the way, this and much of what's above should be on the discussion page, not the Project page) Robin Patterson 12:20, 28 November 2006 (MST)

Thank you both for the feedback. Unless I get opinions otherwise, I'll leave off "United Kingdom", and I'll also leave off the region - is that ok, Tim?--Dallan 00:53, 29 November 2006 (MST)

FWIW, I'll add my agreement to the above. Region seems an unnecessary layer, and I agree with going with the traditional counties, as we're proposing to do for Scotland. And I agree that "UK" adds nothing to "Scotland", "England", and "Wales", especially as at times those were their own countries. Ireland gets even more dodgy in that regard. I suppose it's reasonable to just let "Dingle, Kerry, Ireland" and "Belfast, Antrim, Ireland" both be "Ireland", and if someone doesn't already know which counties lie in which modern jurisdiction, they can easily discover it by clicking into the Place pages for the county. While the political boundaries have changed over centuries, the island per se is pretty unambiguous. (Hope I'm not opening a can of worms here...) --TomChatt 01:47, 29 December 2006 (MST)

Currently we have two top-level countries in the island of Ireland: Place:Northern Ireland and Place:Northern Ireland. This was a difficult choice; I wouldn't be opposed if someone wanted to merge them into Place:Ireland.--Dallan 14:24, 29 December 2006 (MST)

What appears in the autocomplete drop-down list?

When a place used to be known by one name (e.g., Morayshire, Scotland), but is now known by another name (e.g., Moray, Scotland), what should appear in the drop-down list when enter places?

Moray vs. Morayshire problem is going to continue and grow as more people use WeRelate. The place section gives you a dropdown list, but also lets you enter anything you like -- which is great for adding additional places easily, but can lead to other problems. For people who are used to working with pre-1975 place names (like me!), it can be difficult to determine which place on the dropdown list is correct. Perhaps it would be best just to redirect the pages for other versions of place names -- ones including County or shire, or using an old locations designation -- to the current name for the place. Of course, that makes the list of place names longer, but I prefer to refer to the location as it is called out in the document, as opposed to the more modern designation. --Lauren 09:00, 21 December 2006 (MST)

Currently, alternate place names and redirects do not show up in the place autocomplete drop-down. This avoids including both "Chicago, Illinois" and "Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States" in the drop-down. Because "Chicago, Illinois" is a redirect page, it is excluded it from the places drop-down. (Redirects for people, families, and sources are currently included in the drop-down lists though.) One thing: if you enter a place on a person/family page (e.g., "Chicago, IL") that does not match a (non-redirected) place title in the index, when you save the page the system determines if it can identify a unique place in the database that matches the place you entered, and if it can, it replaces the place you entered with the correct place title followed by the text you entered (e.g., "Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States|Chicago, IL"). This allows the system to display the place as you entered it but link to the correct place. I think we have two options:

• We could make Morayshire an alternate name for Moray. It won't show up in the drop-down list, but if you enter "Morayshire, Scotland" in a place field on a person/family page, the system will turn it into "Moray, Scotland|Morayshire, Scotland" when you save the page. (We could enable this behavior for other pages as well if we wanted.)
• We could keep the "Morayshire, Scotland" page and have it redirect to "Moray, Scotland". And we could include redirect pages in the drop-down list. For the drop-down list entry for "Morayshire, Scotland", the name "Moray, Scotland" could appear in smaller text underneath (as the "correct" name for Morayshire). If you select Morayshire from the dropdown list, the system would enter "Moray, Scotland|Morayshire, Scotland" in the place field so it displays the place you selected, but links to Moray.

What do people think about either of these two approaches?--Dallan 13:59, 21 December 2006 (MST)

I'm inclined toward the alternate name approach, rather than the redirect, but it's a mild inclination and could be swayed the other way. :-) How does one turn a page into a redirect? And what happens to other pages that pointed to that page. Do they just continue to point to it and get redirected? And with regard to Places, what happens to Place pages that are tagged as "Located in" Morayshire (which we change to redirect to Moray)? Do those "Located in" relationships automatically map onto Moray? If we look to see the list of contained places in Moray, will it include those Place pages that declare themselves "Located in" Morayshire, as well as those explicitly "Located in" Moray? --TomChatt 01:11, 22 December 2006 (MST)

I just realized that we could have alternate names show up in the drop-down list without too much trouble. Each entry in the dropdown list would have either the preferred or alternate name form as the first line, and the page title as the second line. So if you entered "Morayshire," you would see an entry "Morayshire, Scotland" with "Moray, Scotland" underneath it. If you selected this entry, the system would enter "Moray, Scotland|Morayshire, Scotland" as the name of the place. What I'd like to avoid with this approach is the need to have two entries for say Buckie, which is a town in Moray. That is, I'd rather have just the entry "Buckie, Moray, Scotland" in the dropdown, and not also have "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland" because I worry that this might clutter up the dropdown list, especially since Elgin and Moireibh as alternate names for Moray as well.

I think if we want to have names like "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland" but not "Buckie, Moireibh, Scotland" (that is, including some combinations of alternate names for higher-level jurisdictions) in the drop-down list, then we'll need to have people create redirects for the specific name combinations that they want to see in the drop-down list. If on the other hand, we're happy with having "Morayshire, Scotland", "Elgin, Scotland" and "Moireibh, Scotland" in the dropdown list (all with "Moray, Scotland" as the second line), and "Buckie, Moray, Scotland" but not "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland" (that is, the drop-down list includes alternate names for the place listed, but does not include alternate names for higher-level jurisdictions), then adding alternate names to the drop-down list will be simpler than having to create redirects. We could also possibly do both -- always include alternate names for the place listed, and include alternate names for higher-level jurisdictions only if there were a redirect with that specific name combination.--Dallan 11:36, 23 December 2006 (MST)

I don't think I'm following all the alternatives here, but I do know that it's impressive that all the little towns and villages are located when I enter the name. I think it gives me more confidence when entering a placename. I don't know if it's towards Google or Wikipedia or the people who built this site that we should be thankful for the wealth of information. My preference would be that the one placename that it's been determined best describes a place be given as a choice rather than be presented with a list of alternative names for the same place. And if the placename changed from Morayshire to Moray after 1975 (or from Berlin, Ontario to Kitchener, Ontario during WWII) that the proper names somehow be determined by the system depending on the date of the event. It will always be a fight to maintain some order amongst everyone's differing ways of citing sources and places, so I think there needs to be some way of steering people towards a common way of presentation rather than providing a wealth of options. --Tim 18:54, 23 December 2006 (MST)

Determining the proper name based upon a date could be challenging. I agree with your point about steering toward a common presentation, but it's also good to represent the place as it was known at the time the record was made. I think we can achieve these goals to a limited degree by linking places to the "correct" place title and allowing people to enter variants using the bar("|"). For example, the following text links to Moray, Scotland, but shows "Morayshire, Scotland": Morayshire, Scotland. If someone enters "Morayshire, Scotland" into a place field, we automatically convert it to this link. The question here is, when someone enters "Morayshire," into a place field what should show up in the dropdown list? Currently, we display "Moray, Scotland" with no indication as to why we display it -- you just have to assume that since we displayed Moray, Morayshire must be an alternate name for Moray. And when you select Moray, the place link becomes just Place:Moray, Scotland; not Morayshire, Scotland, which is preferable I think. So I'm thinking of changing the drop-down to include the alternate name: "Morayshire, Scotland" (with the correct place title "Moray, Scotland" underneath it). Then when people select it, we'll save the place link as Morayshire, Scotland. One question is, does this make sense?--Dallan 20:08, 26 December 2006 (MST)

A second question has to do with what to display in the drop-down list for contained places inside Moray. For example, Buckie is a town in Moray, Scotland. If someone enters "Buckie," into a place field, what do we display in the drop-down: "Buckie, Moray, Scotland", "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland", or both? I'm leaning toward just displaying "Buckie, Moray, Scotland," and not displaying "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland". Would people be ok with that? Alternatively, I could also display "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland" (with the correct place title "Buckie, Moray, Scotland" underneath it) in the case when someone had created a place page "Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland" that redirected to "Buckie, Moray, Scotland". You'd then see two entries in the dropdown list that would both link to the same place, but selecting one would show Place:Buckie, Moray, Scotland in the place field, while selecting the other would show Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland. Would people want this? (The links for Buckie are red because the page title for Buckie is currently just "Buckie, Scotland", but that will be corrected before too long.)--Dallan 20:08, 26 December 2006 (MST)

We need to consider this carefully, or we could have our drop-down menus suffering a combinatorial explosion. Consider that the county of Moray has at least two alternative names -- Morayshire and Moiraigh (the Gaelic name, not sure about the spelling but it's close), and Scotland currently has a bunch of alternate names (including the Gaelic "Alba", and French, German, Spanish and other variants of Scotland). Thus even assuming that the town of Buckie has no alternate names of its own and no other towns named Buckie in the world, just putting in "Buckie," could cause a drop-down menu with 15 different combinations of alternate names for Moray and Scotland:

• Buckie, Moray, Scotland
• Buckie, Morayshire, Scotland
• Buckie, Moiraigh, Scotland
• Buckie, Moray, Alba
• Buckie, Morayshire, Alba
• Buckie, Moiraigh, Alba
• Buckie, Moray, Escosia
• Buckie, Morayshire, Escosia
• Buckie, Moiraigh, Escosia
• etc. etc. etc.

If there are other Buckies in the world (or even in other counties of Scotland), it gets even more horrendous. Keep in mind what will happen for some of the more common place names (say, "Woodend" in Scotland, nearly one in each parish I'd venture). I think you'll agree we'll want to be wary of exploding menus! If we want to offer alternate names in menu form, perhaps we only show the "definitive" names in the first menu, but offer a secondary "pull-right" menu of alternate forms?

This is a good point. I hadn't anticipated adding combinations of higher-level jurisdictions into the drop-down list unless people had gone to the trouble of creating a redirect for a specific combination, but you're right - over time we could have a lot of entries in the drop-down list that referred to the same place. We'd either have to (a) limit the redirects that people create, or (b) not include redirects in the drop-down list at all. One possible reason to include redirects for places in the drop-down list is that we're planning to include them for sources. On the other hand, we don't have a combinatorial explosion problem for sources. I lean toward not including redirects for places in the drop-down list unless someone has feelings otherwise. (But I think we can still include alternate names for the specific place being entered, so if you enter "Morayshire," you'll see "Moray, Scotland" in the drop-downlist, but if you enter "Buckie," you'll just see "Buckie, Moray, Scotland".)--Dallan 14:26, 28 December 2006 (MST)

In any case, I think we want the ability to be able to link to a specific Place page, but also be able to provide a variant name for display purposes. For example, when entering information from a record, you would like to be able to represent the place name exactly as it appeared on the record. That may include name and spelling variants or even plain old spelling errors.

You can do this today by entering in the "correct" name of the place, followed by a bar(|), followed by the name you want displayed for the source. For example, you could enter "Moray, Scotland|Morayshire, Scotland" into a place field to link to Moray but display Morayshire.

On a tangent note, we should probably be a bit judicious about what we put into alternate place names. For instance, on Place:Scotland, I think it's appropriate to include historic names like Caledonia and the Gaelic name "Alba" (which I notice now isn't actually included), but I wonder whether we should include French, German, Spanish, and Italian variants for the country name. (Note: these were "auto-extracted" from a Rand-McNally Atlas apparently.) My inclination would be not to include foreign language variants that don't have a particular relationship to the place in question (i.e., Gaelic is relevant to Scotland in a way that German and Italian aren't; one could make a case for Norse). I'm also not sure how useful the auto-generated WeRelate abbreviations are. Scotland's alternate names include "Scotlnd" and "Schottlnd" as "WeRelate abbreviations". Keep in mind that each added variant is potentially multiplying our drop-down menus! --TomChatt 00:19, 27 December 2006 (MST)

I'm planning to use alternate place names eventually to help identify when two pages are for the same person. For example, if one page is for John McDonald born in "Moray, Scotland" and another page is for "John McDonald" born in "Morayshire, Alba", having alternate names helps in determining whether these two pages are for the same John McDonald. A second use is to better identify places when searching web pages (e.g., if you search for "Moray, Scotland" you can get back pages containing "Morayshire, Alba"). A third use is to link places in uploaded gedcoms to the correct place pages when we support gedcom upload. Having said this, if an alternate name would not appear in a family tree or genealogy record, then please feel free to remove it so that it doesn't clutter up the list. And if an alternate name is missing, please add it!--Dallan 14:26, 28 December 2006 (MST)

To answer Tom's questions:

• To create a redirect, if the page want to redirect already exists and the title you want it to redirect to does not exist, you just move the page by clicking on the Move link. If the title you want the page to redirect to already exists, then go to or create the page you want to redirect, and leave all fields blank except for the text, where you enter "#redirect [[Place:page that it redirects to]]".
• Pages that point to a redirected page aren't generally changed. When someone follows a link to a redirected page, they're automatically taken to the page that it redirects to. There are some exceptions to this: If you move a person page, families that list that person as a spouse or child are updated with the new page title. If you move a family page, people that list that family as a "child of family" or "spouse of family" are updated with the new page title. If you move a place page, the places that the moved place is "located in" or "previously located in" are updated with the new page title (so that contained places reflects the new page title). But in general, links to the page aren't updated.
• If you move a place page, the "located in" or "previously located in" fields on places contained in the moved place aren't updated. They still point to the old place title, and people get redirected if they follow the "(previously) located in" link. I could automatically update contained places to point to the redirected-to place though. Maybe I should do this?

--Dallan 12:10, 23 December 2006 (MST)

Content overhaul

I noticed that the content of this project page was minimal, but there was a detailed discussion of place page titles on the Help:Places page. It had a nicely-formatted section of examples. Unfortunately, it was not consistent with the policy stated here, or in use in many of the actual pages. So, I snatched that nicely formatted section from there, moved it to here (with a reference from there to here), and updated it to reflect my best understanding of the current policy. So now, as we come to conclusions on this discussion here, we can update the corresponding details on the project page itself. (Note: I was presumptive in putting in my proposed innovation on the "(county)" bit. But hey, it's a wiki, and I was being bold. It's easily changed. :-)) --TomChatt 02:41, 30 December 2006 (MST)

Thank you!--Dallan 22:33, 2 January 2007 (MST)

Historical places

Specifically I have a city in Alabama located in Franklin County, Alabama. The city is a historical place; this city no longer exists. I see that currently I can not add places because of the reindexing but when I am able to add this place; I wanted to discuss my entry beforehand. i can just add Mountain Spring in Franklin in Alabama in the United States. However I do not know the dates the place actually existed. I know that it existed in 1860 - 1868 and probably at least through 1887 but cannot document the 1887; and I have found it on a map. This link is a great site for old maps of Alabama. [1]

My thinking was maybe the place should be entered as Mountain View (historical). Anyway just let me know how y'all wish it to be entered.

--Beth 11:32, 23 December 2007 (EST)