St. Paul, Minnesota has become Saint Paul in standardization, oops.
There's been a curious change in the place standardization that now only offers "Saint Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota, United States" instead of the correct "St. Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota, United States." This is not correct and it should be reset to "St. Paul" please. I also noted "Fort Lauderdale" this morning instead of the correct "Ft. Lauderdale."
Comments
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Are you sure you got things round the right way with your comment on Ft. / Fort Lauderdale? St. Paul might be a more common way of writing Saint Paul, but I can't find any references to Ft. Lauderdale.
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I'm always wary of saying what the correct name for a place is, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names web-site (which I thought listed the "official" names) has
ID:2403640
Name:City of Fort Lauderdale
Class:Civil
and
ID:282693
Name:Fort Lauderdale
Class:Populated Place
(As I understand it, "Civil" refers to the jurisdiction and "Populated Place" to the buildings.)
There's a similar pair for St. Paul:
ID: 662851
Name: Saint Paul
Class: Populated Place
History: Incorporated as a city on 4 March 1854.
Description: The capital of the State of Minnesota.
and
ID: 2396511
Name: City of Saint Paul
Class: Civil
Whether FS should use the Civil or Populated Place names, I've no idea, but neither include the abbreviations.
Personally, I'd be more worried about the effect on any indexing and searching of any name changes. I'm hoping that the alternate names see us through but it's difficult to be certain.
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OK, I'll forget about Ft. Lauderdale. But Saint Paul? Nope.
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"Saint Paul? Nope"
Why?
If the US Board on Geographic Names web-site is wrong, you need to provide some evidence of that, e.g. an act of incorporation using the short version.
Remember please that the "Standard Name" is not supposed to be the most popular name. Otherwise we'd have (say) "NYC" as the Standard Name. It's supposed to be the official name. (Which can be difficult enough to find...)
I've never had to type the city of which you speak - if I did, I'm totally certain that I'd type "St. Paul" - but that doesn't make it the official name, merely the most common spelling. As it is, the system will deal with you and I typing "St. Paul...." and offer us "Saint Paul..." as the official name. Seems like a good use of computers.
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