I loled. You gotta love Wikipedia. Top quality crap right there.

I don't get it.

Is it a shitty-bike race, or a shitty bike-race?

Be interesting to see how long the feculent adjective in question remained on the page for google to pick up the version with it in. :\

Fourteen minutes. But that's not really relevant - the way the current system works, it only has to be there for no more than one second: precisely the second during which google picks up the page.

Craptacular.

I would copyedit it to "dutiful", as in "full of doody".

Fourteen minutes.

What's funny is that the first edit to the article made by AnonIP 80.249.48.132 was to change the word "throughout" to "around" in that same (first) sentence, and that change (something of an improvement, IMO) is still in place.

Of course, the sentence was poorly constructed to begin with - instead of saying:

It should probably be more like this:

And then the later sentence, "The course changes every year but it has always finished in Paris, since 1975 along the Champs-Élysées," should be changed to something more like this:

In other words, assume the reader understands that the race is primarily held in France (because it's called the "Tour de France"), but doesn't necessarily know that it's not a flat track, and wait until later in the intro to mention that it's not exclusively in France.

But you'll have added that "Parrrris, Frrraaaance!" combo, which makes you sound like The Beach Boys welcoming crowds on their European Tour.

Next stop, "Lonnnndoonn, Englandddd"!

How else do you distinguish them from Paris, Texas and London, Ontario?

Size matters.

One article gets to be called Paris... the rest get commas.

One would expect that even self-proclaimed Mensa members could figure out that the Paris stage of the Tour de France refers to Paris in France rather than some tiny backwater in Texas.


We went through this before. That whole comma thing is an American City-State habit and sounds silly to other people. Especially when referring to cities like London, Paris, Madrid etc.

So how do you refer to New York, Tyne and Wear? Or, for that matter, Los Ángeles, Chile?

"New York (Tyne and Wear)". See the dab pages for railway stations of the same name in two different British towns (St Margarets railway station, Kew Gardens station, Hammersmith tube station etc) for a Wikipedia example of "standard British" disambiguation.

I've never heard of New York in Tyne and Wear.

I'd call Washington, Tyne and Wear Washington in Tyneside, or Washington in the North East of England. Los Ángeles de Chile or Los Angeles in Chile.

Not in the title, but certainly in normal text or when speaking.

Didn't figure you had, but I didn't want to spend too much time to look for a better example. My point was really the more general "how do you refer to somewhere that the one you're referring to in Europe (or wherever outside the US/Canada) is not the largest/most important one with the name"

If I'm not mistaken you claimed not to be a WP editor but supposing you were writing an article about (or mentioning) one of these cities, but did not have any bullshit style manuals to refer or conform to... would you use a comma?

The German WP for example uses parentheses, but only when necessary.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(Texas)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Beach_(Kalifornien)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Rapids_(Michigan)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskegon
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo
etc. etc. etc.

Of course the English WP is generally biased toward American syntax, which is loathe to bend without a metro population of ~2 million.

On the Seattle page I recall Rootology had a hell of a time arguing with a handful of postal-ese nimrods who felt that the state-name is the de facto second half ("surname" even) of any U.S. city, and that WP should not omit ", State" no matter how unique or ubiquitous the first half might be.

He said something like "I'd like to see them try that in the big apple, moving [[New York City]] to [[New York, New York]]"... yeah, I'm pretty sure that only means Manhattan to the USPS (granted I've never tried to mail anything there).

Fascinating stuff...vandalism WIN. When I wrote articles on Israeli villages, I used the comma if the name of the village already had an article elsewhere for a primary meaning of that name: for example, [[Devorah, Israel]]. I do not know whether this is consistent with Wikipedia naming conventions.

Link (note that someone changed the name to Dvora, which I think is consistent with the relevant naming convention): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devorah,_Israel

Personally, I would lose the ", France" from that sentence, but realistically there's no way Wikipedians are going to allow such a removal to stand. Consistency is the bugaboo of WP-influenced minds, as they say. (Actually, it's just one of several...)

Check that old thread I linked to.

Boston in Lincolnshire or Boston in Britain. But I reckon I'd say Birmingham, Alabama because that's the US custom and I'm used to hearing it like that.

This is all pretty irrelevant and pedantic. It's just funny that folks in the US are oblivious to how anachronistic "Paris, France" / "London, England" sounds elsewhere. Comedy acts have used that comma terminology when they want to parody Americans. "Helloooo Lonnnndonnnn, England"!

I like the "France" to stay as it is. There are some readers who don't know what country "Paris" is in. At least, I would write with that lowest common denominator in mind. I hope that's not too onerous for the rest of us who do know where to find Paris on a world map.

Give me a break. If you don't know what country Paris is in you wouldn't be reading an article on the Tour de France in the first place.

And you should probably be put to sleep for the public's safety.

But surely purists would keep the "h", based on the transliteration DVVRH, with two vees, to vit: vet and vav—oy vey...

And of course Baltimore refers to some place in the USA; the real and original place is Baltimore, County Cork.

When a man is tired of London, England, he is tired of life.

On the other hand, when he is tired of London, Arkansas, it may be helpful for him at least to move to London, Ohio.

I agree that when writing prose, using prepositions makes for an easy read....and even some geogrpaphical qualifier (e.g. Nice on the French Riviera, Carcassonne in SW France etc.)

Whereas adding extra letters does not.

Yeah, about like the real Boston is Boston, Uzbekistan.

Well it is a real place at least, out on the old silk road... and I'm slightly incensed that anglo-centric editors have not deemed it important to enough list on the Boston (disambiguation) page, apostrophe or no.

Romanization of "Ў" is a bit hazy though. We typically transliterate "Ўзбек" to "Uzbek" rather than "O'zbek", but the actual sound is closer to /ø/ which doesn't really exist in English. Russians spelled it without the breve as "Бустан" ("Bustan"). The "o with apostrophe" proposed by UNGEGN in the mid-1990s is just a weak approximation of what Uzbeks (that is, the few who aren't still using the soviet-era cyrillic) would hand-write "ō", in probably because macrons weren't present in whatever character encoding they used at the time.

My finely honed linguistic analytical skills tell me the name probably means something like "place of gardens", which for Celtics fans would be eerily amusing.

Must be in Uzbek (Turkic->Altaic), because the more Indo-European Russian word for garden is огород (ogorod), related to город (gorod), city. Like in Stalingrad and Novgorod. The "grad" in these words (probably something proto-Slavik introduced northeastward by Ostrogoths or something), is a cognate of all the same "garden" words in other Indo-European languages (jardin in French, lub-gart in Irish, etc). Also gird, girdle, yard, court, the hortus in horitculture, orchard, and so on. I think there's a stem in Sanskrit which means basically "grab" which was co-opted to mean belt or enclosed bit of land (for whatever purpose).

Uzbekistan is one of more land-locked countries I know of. A place of gardens certainly.

Yeah it's an Uzbek word (see p. 8), but with Indo-Iranic roots I'd reckon.