Comment by spencerchubb
Comment by spencerchubb 6 days ago
There are multiple cities in the U.S. with the name of my city, so unfortunately this doesn't work for me.
Comment by spencerchubb 6 days ago
There are multiple cities in the U.S. with the name of my city, so unfortunately this doesn't work for me.
It's a funny cultural thing that it wouldn't have even occurred to me that someone in Europe wouldn't realize city names can conflict—it's a chronic problem here in the states.
There are some ridiculously common city names here, but one that's been in the news lately and probably confusing a lot of people is Springfield, which is the name of at least 42 different cities in the US [0], including 5 just in Wisconsin. Most of them are small, but 5 of them (Massachusetts, Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Ohio) have more the 20k residents.
The long-defunct literary magazine Wigwag ran a monthly essay by an Angolan writer named Sousa Jamba titled "Letter from Springfield." For each installment he visited a different U.S. Springfield.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigwag_(magazine)
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wigwag-the-magaz...
Plenty of European countries have conflicting city/town/village names as well. If they grow to large they are sometimes specified by adding more locality to their name.
Denmark has three cities names Nykøbing, typically specified as Nykøbing Mors, Nykøbing Sjælland or Nykøbing Falser. Small places are just allowed to conflict as long as they aren't in the same postcode.
> It's a funny cultural thing that it wouldn't have even occurred to me that someone in Europe wouldn't realize city names can conflict
The irony is that a lot of our city names came from Europe.
> and probably confusing a lot of people is Springfield, which is the name of at least 42 different cities
And a person, who wrote a song about name confusion, but wrt Springsteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW1Frr4OcRc
FWIW, Wikipedia has a list of the most common place names in the United States. "Washington" leads at 91, which means nearly two occurrences per state, though this includes variant names such as "Old Washington", "Port Washington", and "Washingtonville":
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._p...>
Other issues you might want to consider are locations with multiple names or spelling variants, say, "Ciudad de México" and "Mexico City" or Pretoria/Tshwane, various script variants, or disputed names. Or closely-paired locations, such as Minneapolis / St. Paul or Dallas / Fort Worth. Or those which have changed names (Bombay / Mumbai, Calcutta / Kolkota, Madras / Chennai).
For the United States, using MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) will tend to group people by urban region, with less ambiguity and grouping of reasonably proximate locations. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a widely-used standard elsewhere.
Cue: "Falsehoods programmers believe about geography"
Yeah for US it needs to be:
City, State, Country
Also not clear if your mapper was expecting “United States” or “United States of America”
Honestly postal code is better. There are many cities with the same name in the same state. Generally postal codes are logical boundaries.
Much harder to geolocate internationally. You really need a geocoding service that accepts flexible input text, narrows the result set, and lets the user pick one.
And to keep in mind, cities are mostly unique in a state but not entirely. There was another Oakland California twenty years ago. I don't know if it still exists 'cause Google no longer works for discovery of things like that.
Check out how many "greenville" s there are. Even several in the same state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenville
There's even more than one "Las Vegas".
“Las Vegas” means the meadows. The Spanish were usually pragmatic when naming locations on their maps, e.g. Del Rio, El Paso (de Norte), and Presidio in Texas; Salida, La Junta, and Pueblo in Colorado; the Sierra Nevada in California; and El Camino Real’s everywhere.
There are, for example, over 30 cities in the US named Springfield.
I'm sorry about that. I didn't realize it would be a problem. It's been reported before and I'll work on this. Thanks for sharing!