Talk:Gazetteer

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IMO, the two articles (gazetteer and World gazetteer) should be combined under the title "gazetteer". Further, World and electronic versions should be treated in that one article as versions. Bwood 03:58, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Moved. - UtherSRG 07:30, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

Moved from article:

This is not the main sense of "gazetteer," and clearly we will want an article about gazetteers in that main sense. Where should the above article live? "Electronic gazetteer"? "Database gazetteer"?

Contents 1 Major Revisions Necessary 2 Dictionary or Directory? 3 Major expansion 4 Images 5 Balance

[edit] Major Revisions Necessary

I propose changing the structure and content of the article. The article contains a rather narrow definition of a gazetteer and lumps all variations into one category. Gazetteers and gazetteer services offer much more in information management and information retrieval. Furthermore, increased interest in geospatial technologies and digital libraries (digital gazetteers) has fueled public and private research and development into the development a gazetteers' commercial and enterprise applications (e.g., enterprise georeferenceing, geoparsing). I think the article should be modified to reflect such developments. Anyone interested in discussing this?
Jde123 17:30, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't think this is a wise idea; think it covers the definition of a gazetteer widely and well. GIS / Digital gazetteers are actually a rather more narrow definition. Sorry!

[edit] Dictionary or Directory?

Suggest changing the definition from "geographical dictionary" to "geographical directory" as "dictionary" implies that there is a definition. Of course sometimes this is the case, but often a gazetteer is just a list of places with a reference.Bazonka 15:20, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

=Don't agree with this; "geographical dictionary" is a well-established definition :

"dictionary" = "a book giving information on particular subjects or on a particular class of words, names, or facts, usually arranged alphabetically", for definition of gazetteer see the OED or dictionary.com 82.41.24.142 00:34, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but a gazetteer does not necessarily give information - it could just be a list of places. A dictionary definition of Directory is "a book containing an alphabetical or classified listing of names, addresses, and other data" which to my mind seems much more appropriate - the fact that OED calls it a "geographical dictionary" is irrelevant if a more appropriate description exists. Changed to ambiguous "dictionary/directory". Bazonka (talk) 17:04, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major expansion

I have added the etymology section, the types and organization section, split the reference and notes section, and although I did not originally create the history section, all but two sentences under the "modern" sub-section are my doing. Although much has been done so far, there is still much to be added. The section on the Western World and the gigantic sub-section on China are fine as they stand at the moment. However, I need help from others on the history of South Asian, Islamic World, Japanese, and Korean gazetteers. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 12:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Images

While the images of maps make the article look nice, several have little connection to the topic (gazetteers). Some come from gazetteers, but the fact that some gazetteers contain maps is almost fortuitous; they give the impression that gazetteers are map-based whereas they are essentially textual works (geographical dictionaries). Put in some illustrations of typical gazetteer pages, but I suggest these maps are removed. --129.215.85.80 (talk) 10:31, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Balance

This article now seems to me to be unbalanced. While a lot of interesting information has been added, it is now predominantly historical and predominantly east-asian. As someone who compiles gazetteers, I don't see these as the principal issues of interest and the article therefore gives a false impression. --129.215.85.80 (talk) 10:37, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Unless you haven't already, you'd be surprised how hard it is to find scholarly books or journals written about gazetteers, let alone ones that aren't based on historical gazetteers, and not just gazetteers in general. On JSTOR, I found tons of articles on pre-modern Chinese gazetteers, and could find barely anything on anything else. Hence, the undue weight...for now. This article is by far not done, a fact I've already mentioned above.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 14:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

That I'm afraid is the nature of academic research, which shouldn't really be reflected here. I am quite sure there are historians who study gazetteers along with other ancient literary works, but those of us active is gazetteer research would point towards, for example, the United Nations (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/INF.12.pdf), Linda Hill (http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer/ or http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/hill/01hill.html), PCGN in the UK (http://www.pcgn.org.uk/) or Bruce Gittings (http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/gaztitle.html). There is a lot of current activity in gazetteer design, creation, management and standardisation which are the key research issues of the moment, rather than ancient gazetteers of the Far East, which seems to be to be a narrow field which reflects your personal interests. My point is someone reading the article as it now stands would get entirely the wrong impression of where the bulk of gazetteer work has been done (19th century onwards).

--129.215.85.80 (talk) 16:56, 10 April 2008 (UTC)