Talk:Long Island, Massachusetts

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[edit] Merge

Note that Long Island (Boston) was merged into this article at some point. Rich Farmbrough 10:28 28 August 2006 (GMT).

[edit] Recent move

I have just moved Long Island, Boston, Massachusetts to Long Island (Massachusetts). There was no discussion of previous moves on the (empty) talk page, so I was unaware of the previous history of moves until after the move, when I spotted it in linking user talk pages. Sorry, but that is one good reason for using article talk pages. Anyway I stand by my move, for the following reasons.

I came across it doing some other edits on the Boston Harbor Islands. The previous name seemed cumbersome in the extreme, differs wildly from the dab standards for other similar islands, and does not seem to conform to WP standards. There is no evidence of ambiguity between articles on different Long Islands in MA, and WP strongly discourages preemptive disambiguation. So Massachusetts ought to be a sufficient disambiguator. Whether it is Long Island, Massachusetts or Long Island (Massachusetts) depends on whether you view the article as being about a settlement (in which case the special case US settlement rules of city, state kick in) or a geographic feature (in which case standard WP rules of parenthetic disambiguation apply). From the lede of the article, I chose the geographic feature approach, which also matches most other dab cases in the harbor islands. -- Chris j wood 09:27, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi Chris, I have no strong feelings on the subject, as long as the redirects are in place, and the users can find the article easily. The guideline is to use the most common name, therefore I would tend to avoid (). I expect the precedence of dab rules vs geog rules ahas been thrashed out, but for the above reason, I would think geog should trump dab, even if it is only meant to apply to a subset of geog. Further more in geog it's not unusual to refer to a super-location in everyday English, whereas if two people (not wikipedians) said "I went to see Jaws, film, last night" it would be unusual to say the least. Am I making sense? Rich Farmbrough 10:05 28 August 2006 (GMT).

Hi Rich. To be honest, I'm not sure I'm following you here. Certainly it would be great if we could just refer to this island as Long Island, but equally obviously we cannot because there is an expectation out in the world that Long Island is a rather bigger island in the state of New York. Even if somebody in Boston said to me 'I went to Long Island last week', I think I'd assume they meant the one in NY. Given that fact, I don't think there is a really well defined common name for the one in Boston Harbor. Incidentally my reading of WP naming rules is that the root name (In this case 'Long Island') shoulf be the most common name; I don't think that there is any requirement for the disambiguated name to be in common usage; just to be sensible. -- Chris j wood 23:01, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

P.S.It's also possible that a talk page wasn't moved at some point.

I have merged the histories of one lineage of this page. Rich Farmbrough 10:29 28 August 2006 (GMT).

Hi Chris and Rich. I wish the article would stay in a stable place. Rich and I had a discussion before I moved it into Long Island, Boston, Massachusetts. All the links should be fixed on general principles. I am not much in favour of the parentheses. But we must let it be. I have cited the article to many people, including historians. Please advise. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 13:08, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi Bob. I should not have caused you any problems as far as the references you have given out is concerned. I redirected everything in sight in article space, even including some of the really odd prior redirects that had both commas and parentheses. -- Chris j wood 22:51, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

It's all very good, Chris. Excellent work. Thanks and Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 13:08, 29 August 2006 (UTC) (User talk:Wikiklrsc)