User:Nilfanion/Disambiguation of places

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Draft RFC. Intended to give a neutral summary, and list pertinent CFDs (both open and closed)

Commons has no clear guidance on when disambiguation should be added to category titles. This is a particular problem for location categories because of a few factors:

Factors supporting disambiguation[edit]

  1. The choice of Wikipedia titles is guided by the concept of primary topics. As a result, this means the article on London, England, is at London as its by far the most important topic of that name.
  2. When users create a new Commons category for a place, they generally copy the title from their "home" Wikipedia (usually the English one). That means Category:London is about the English city, even though that title is ambiguous.
  3. Commons cares about many more locations than Wikipedia, as a Wikipedia article may not be justified for a farm or a place less than a hamlet, but Commons might need a category if we have a single photo of the place. This means even apparently disambiguated Wikipedia titles like "Bradshaw, Kirklees" may not be sufficient to make the equivalent Commons category title fully unambiguous.
  4. Commons cares about many languages, Wikipeda only cares about one. A title that is unambiguous in English might have a different meaning in Spanish.
  5. Uploads to Commons and categorisation efforts focus on keywords. For instance, if a Flickr image has a tag of "London" may be placed in the Commons Category:London, even if it is of a different place named London (such as London, Ontario) or even something else named London that isn't a place (such as London (horse)). Bot uploads are particularly prone to these errors.
  6. Photos of different locations can look very similar. This means it can be difficult to correct errors, as you may not be able to tell if a picture in Category:London is actually of the Canadian city.
  7. The above facts means there is pressure to make changes, to avoid title ambiguity.

Factors against disambiguation[edit]

  1. If moves happen, these can break incoming links both from Wikimedia projects and other places. This is problematic for long-term stable titles about important topics.
  2. When there is an important place of a given name, if that name is provided at upload, it is probable that the important place is thing they are uploading. For instance, someone uploading an image of "England" is probably providing an image of something that relates to the country, not the city in Arkansas or the astronaut.
  3. When there is an important place of a given name, if that name is used as a search term, it is likely that the important place is what they are looking for media of.
  4. If the important place is at the base name, those people needing the important place find things easy, while people after other subjects can have problems. If the base name is a disambiguation page, everyone is slightly disadvantaged.
  5. That means the cost to the majority can outweigh the benefits to the minority. Wikipedia makes similar judgement calls when assigning primary topics.
  6. Places can have lots of subcategories, and subcategories inherit the title of the main topic. This means the administrative work associated with a category change can be extremely large. For example, a move of London to London, England, could generate thousands of category moves.
  7. It is likely that the important place has many more subcategories than the alternative topics. For instance Category:Buildings in England exists, but Category:Buildings in England, Arkansas doesn't. If England was moved to Category:England (country), would we also move Category:Buildings in England? If we did, would we convert Category:Buildings in England into a dab?
  8. All these extra dabs could generate a lot of maintenance work. They may have the potential to make it more difficult to use Commons.
  9. These facts mean there is pressure to maintain status quo, accepting a degree of title ambiguity.

There are two competing pressures, and it is not clear how to resolve them. This has generated several discussions as follows:

Active CFDs[edit]

Closed CFDs[edit]

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