Talk:San José

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Comments[edit]

Can I include Puerto San José in Guatemala? --SqueakBox 16:40, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

yes, it is a wiki after all. Gentgeen 01:43, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Which comes first[edit]

You cant compare some obscure US city with a capital city of a sovereign nation. To reinforce the argument with stats from a deeply US centered, California based company doesnt really stand up. The fact that it gives as many hits as Moscow merely proves my point. Are we writing an encyclopedia or a googlepedia? More importantly are we writing the US encyclopedia of world affairs or an international encyclopedia? The answer to the latter is that we are not a US centered encyclopedia. TV Genius 15:09, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There are many ways to measure importance. If we're just looking politically, than I agree, the Capital of Costa Rica is more important than the County Seat of Santa Clara County. However, that not the only consideration.
The population of the California city is roughly 50% larger than the Costa Rican city. However, depending on how you define the term, their metropolitan areas have about the same population.
Economically, there is no contest. This report from the 2000 US Census shows that the city in California is the United States' second-largest exporting city with $26.8 billion in manufacturing exports (less than 4% behind the #1 city, New York City, which has 10 times the population). In contrast, the GDP of all of Costa Rica is about $18 billion, which means the portion of the Californian city's economy devoted to exports is larger than the entire economy of the nation the Costa Rican city is the capital of.
Common usage can in some way be measured by web hits. Unfortunatly, the world's #1 search engine is based in a suburb of the Californian city being considered, so you dispute it's results. I would attempt to use the world's #2 search engine, but, alas, it is also based in a suburb of the Californian city. So I attempted to locate a neutral source and found Netherlands based Walhello. A search for San Jose Costa Rica there turns up almost 277 thousand hits, while one for San Jose California turns up 1.6 million hits, about a 5.7:1 ratio for the California city. Just to keep consistent with my previous example, a search for Moscow on the same engine brings in not quite 1.5 million hits.
I would argue that the Californian city is about as obscure as Manchester; the Californian city has twice the population and was incorporated as a city three years earlier, but the British city has a longer overall history and Greater Manchester has a slightly larger population than the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara Metropolitan Statistical Area (although it is much smaller than the San Jose-San Francico-Oakland Combined Metropolitan Statiscical Area). The truth of the matter is that when a user of our site enters the string "San Jose" or "San José" into our search box, most of the time, they're not looking for the capital of Costa Rica. Gentgeen 23:23, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Your last comment is not only completely unprovable but I would argue it is wrong. I for one had never heard of San Jose in California till i came to this page so I dispute that it is anything like as famous as Manchester. More like as famous as Burnley, ie a not well known US city outside the US. The wealth of the respective cities is completely irrelevant (though here the California city does have an impressive track record, making me wonder why I had never heard of it). Whereas the political reality is very important. Wikipedia is already overbearingly US centered and I believe in countering that systemic bias in order to create both a more NPOV encyclopedia and a more NPOV disambiguation page, justifying my edit on the immensely greater importance of Costa Rica as a political city. The laws and authority that keeps a nation of several million people together and gives those people status in the world (the legitimate right to travel using Costa Rican passports etc) all comes from San Jose. There is nothing remotely comparable in San Jose, California, which doesnt even rule the state of California let alone legitimise and guarantee the sovereignty and freedom of a people in the world. Besides, hits on a search engine counts as original research and is certainly not sourced. TV Genius 23:52, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

When I type San Jose, I expect to find the Silicon Valley city. I didn't even know of a San Jose outside of the States until I the first time I visited this page on Wikipedia. San Jose is very large, old and more important to the world economy. Besides California comes before Costa Rica in ABC order, so it wouldn't have a POV if it were first, I would think. --72.177.34.169 06:32, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not necessarily opposed to the Cost Rican city being listed first (even though the CA city is larger and effects the world more) as it is a capital city, but its just silly to compare San Jose, CA with Burnley. To consider it as famous or important as Burnley would seem to indicate an anti-US (or anti San Jose) bias. San Jose, CA is the 10th largest city in the US. Burnley isn't even listed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_United_Kingdom or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_cities_by_population. In percentage terms San Jose, CA is closer in population to London than it is to Burnley. San Jose has 13 times the population of Burnley, and more than twice the population of Manchester. The main reason that San Jose isn't more known around the world is that it gets lumped in with Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara as part of Silicon Valley, or with those areas plus San Francisco and Oakland, and a few other places as the San Francisco Bay Area (even though San Jose has more people than the city of San Francisco). Twfowler 22:51, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

California does not come before Costa Rica as it is not a sovereign country. Unitede States comes after Costa Rica. I am certain that San Jose is newer than San José. When I type San Jose I expect to find the capital city not some Silicon Valley place I had never heard of. That is why we have a disambiguation page, to fit the different needs of different readers. Both places are clearly there so nobody should actually have any problems. To argue that the California place is more important to the world economy is a controversial statement that may not be true, but whether it is or not this isnt the place to discuss that especially as there is no policy of making richer places more important (for what I hope are obvious reasons). In the past we were all accustomed to nationally based encyclopedias but this is an international; not an American encyclopedia. TV Genius 14:56, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We can't even argue which is more important from a global/economic scale can we? Costa Rica as a whole doesn't even have a third of the GDP of San Jose of Silicon Valley. Not to mention exports... I think alot of people on the internet would look for San Jose because of it's job opportunites, or just for curiosity regarding the "Capital of Silicon Valley". How many people here are even looking for Costa Rica?--Old Guard 02:02, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
May I? I'm an Argentinian and I've never been to either Costa Rica or the United States. I consider myself fairly well educated and informed (geopolitically). If someone asked me up front to name an important city called San José, I would immediately say "San José de Costa Rica". It's a national capital. Wikipedia is not a job opportunity search engine or a collection of curious nicknames. Why not simply list the two cities along with the others? Myself, I'd think unqualified "San José" would never usually refer to San José, California, unless you're American and/or looking for a job in Silicon Valley. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 10:45, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Old Guard, you are assuming that people have heard of San Jose in California whereas I would argue it is an obscure place for most non/Americans. All those arguing in its favour are Americans and you none of you seem to have realised that most Americans have never heard of it. TV Genius 20:25, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]


As a European I had not even heard about a city called San Jose in California. It is pretty obvious that most people would expect to find the capital of Costa Rica. --Vitzque (talk) 15:13, 21 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Being a sovereign country is not such a big deal[edit]

So what if San José, Costa Rica is the capitol of an obscure Third-World country? There are some real hell-holes around the world that are national capitols. San José, California is the third-largest city in the state that has the 11th-largest economy in the world and it was the state capitol of California when San José, Costa Rica was still a sleepy little unknown village.

And just to clear up an error on the Wiki page on San José, California - the "angicized" version of "San José" is Saint Joseph; the accent over the "e" was dropped by the US postal Service when it "simplified" and standardized their "official" spelling of the names of cities and towns all across the United States, the official spelling used by the city government is the correct "San José".

69.107.77.100 07:13, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Revision of 01:07, 31 March 2008[edit]

OK, for over a year there were two SJs listed up top. I have reverted SquawkBox's edit, which threw SJ California into the main list (linking mostly to stubs). I'm not going to argue SJ Cal belongs ahead of a national capital, so I still have SJ CR listed first, but by any reasonable measure (population, economics) SJ California belongs in the top two. Yasha1969 (talk) 23:54, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]


Redirecting to Disambiguation[edit]

Yes, the article named "San Jose" or "San José" should redirect to a disambiguation, because two major cities in the world share this name, and it's just a fair result. Both cities have the same size and similar achievements (one is an important industrial city, the other one is a capital of a country). Besides, according to the same cite in the article "San Jose (disambiguation)":

San José – or San Jose – is the Spanish for Saint Joseph. According to the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's GEOnet Names Server, it is the most common place name in the world. --JorgeRodriguez (talk) 20:54, 17 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

dont need you[edit]

ur the cooliest og all'

San Jose, California should be moved here[edit]

It's much larger and far more important and notable than the other San Jose. Usually, when people accidentally book the wrong reservation and end up in San Jose, Costa Rica, they're actually trying to get to San Jose, California, not the other way around. People make history in San Jose, California every day (for example, more patents are filed from San Jose than anywhere else in the United States), not in San Jose, Costa Rica. --Coolcaesar (talk) 02:27, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that they end up in Costa Rica seems to suggest that that is the more notable San Jose.--Ykraps (talk) 14:36, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No, it suggests that many other countries have incompetent travel agents. San Jose, Costa Rica is an obscure backwater that rarely makes international headlines. (Actually, one could say the same thing about Costa Rica in general.) San Jose, California is frequently in international headlines because eBay and Adobe (to name two) are headquartered there. San Jose, California is regularly visited by the President of the United States with enough frequency that the Secret Service maintains an office there; the last time a U.S. President visited San Jose, Costa Rica was President Clinton back in 1997. Also, both the city of San Jose, California and the surrounding metro area are home to larger, better educated, and far wealthier populations than their counterparts in Costa Rica. When I have the time this summer I plan to formally initiate the proposed move process.--Coolcaesar (talk) 10:40, 30 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was not moved. --BDD (talk) 19:28, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

– With the exception of a few minor villages and small cities scattered around Latin America, no page has any claim to be at San José besides San José, Costa Rica. Note the accent. In the English-speaking world, I don't believe anybody ever uses "San José" to refer to the major U.S. metropolis. I would in fact support San Jose redirecting to San Jose, California, but that's beside the point here. Very few English-language users type in the exact title San José expecting to get a target other than the capital of Costa Rica. So we should probably move it there. Red Slash 23:51, 6 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose if the disambiguation page is to be moved, it should be move San Jose (disambiguation), though currently I think it should be called San Jose if it isn't displaced to point to particular city. Many of the entries on the page do not contain accents, so the simpler form should be used to title the page. -- 65.94.76.126 (talk) 03:16, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose – while it's common to drop the accent from the name of the California San José, it's certainly not rare to keep it, as on the city's home page. A disambig page seems like the right thing here. And it already has the appropriate redirects from non-accented variants. Dicklyon (talk) 06:02, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Dicklyon; it's not safe to assume that all English speakers (or even most of them) are aware of the correct usage/non-usage of an accent in the California city's name. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:02, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - as I have stated above, the better arrangement is to have the California city of San Jose under this article title because it is by far the most commonly referred-to "San Jose" in the English language and is far more important than the one in Costa Rica. --Coolcaesar (talk) 16:48, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • If it's most commonly referred to as "San Jose", why would you want its article called "San José"?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by LtPowers (talk • contribs) 17:08, 7 May 2013
  • Support; hatnotes will suffice to direct users to the appropriate article. Powers T 17:08, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. San Jose and San José should lead to the same place as it's clear that there is no clear and consistent distinction made between them by English speakers. The only settlement that has a claim to primary topic status is the Californian one, so it or the dab page needs to be at this title. Thryduulf (talk) 18:09, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Thryduulf. Gentgeen (talk) 08:00, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment As per WP:USPLACE, the city in California would never be listed at plain-Jane San Jose, because it would follow U.S. conventions with City, State. And there's no way it's beating out the capital of Costa Rica and a slew of other smaller cities for San José, and following your guys' logic, we can never have San Jose and San José pointing to different places, despite how logically that would fix a whole boatload of our problems. So we're going to be stuck with this disambiguation for now. Not probably the worst thing in the history of the world. Red Slash 00:45, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • General comment It's a bad idea, if at all avoidable, to have different articles whose titles differ only by a diacritic, especially one so haphazardly used or omitted. It's not clear from the proposal what Red Slash wants the title of the article on the California city to be, but surely having San Jose be in California but San José in Costa Rica is a non-starter. So that seems to leave moving this page to San Jose, California (or perhaps San José, California?), but that goes against the general agreement on US cities, unless the Costa Rica city is to be promoted based on its national-capital status in spite of its lower general prominence. --Trovatore (talk) 01:53, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Oh, now that I look closer, Red Slash does indeed seem to think that San Jose should point to the California city, and San José to the Costa Rica one. No no no no no, that won't do at all. The diacritic cannot be used distinctively. That would cause no end of confusion. --Trovatore (talk) 01:56, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • If we use capitalization in such a manner, what's the difference in using diacritics in this manner? -- 65.94.76.126 (talk) 04:53, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • It's like the difference between bad and worse. We usually try not to use capitalization that way, but some times editors insist, like with Red Meat. With diacritics, we're always supposed to have a redirect from the plain variety; it's hard to do that if you're going to try to use the plain one for a different topic. Dicklyon (talk) 05:49, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • Major difference is that most users of an English language encyclopedia can type capitals from their keyboard easily, but not diacriticals - so people shouldn't have to get the diacriticals right to get simply to the page they need. PamD 14:02, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • That doesn't explain all the other untypable characters we use to distinguish between two different articles (such as dashes) -- 65.94.76.126 (talk) 03:58, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • I can't think of any case in which we would use a dash to distinguish an article from a different one that uses a hyphen or a different type of dash. Powers T 15:59, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
              • I can think of a case: - versus – and —. Other than those, I hope there are none. Dicklyon (talk) 18:32, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • Although this is off-topic, we really shouldn't use capitalization to distinguish article titles. Users who rely on screen readers can't hear any difference between Super Speed and super speed. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:11, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • True, how do we change that? Can we prevail upon accessibility concerns to get rid of capital letter disambiguation? -- 65.94.76.126 (talk) 03:58, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • Indeed, this reliance on capitalization to distinguish uses has puzzled me for a long time. It is something that is easily confused and really should be treated as exceptional rather recommended as a norm. older ≠ wiser 13:26, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

"San jo" listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect San jo. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Steel1943 (talk) 16:22, 5 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proposing a split of redirects[edit]

I propose that “San Jose” be redirected to the California city and “San José” be redirected to the Costa Rica city. Mrbeastmodeallday (talk) 23:33, 4 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One additional factor I failed to mention in the proposal is that in English language keyboards/devices, “e” is generally the natural and convenient character to immediately show up and it takes more effort and intentionality beyond that to get to “é” combined with English being the de facto official language of San Jose, CA and its most closely-related topics. With the Costa Rican city, I’m presuming that the topic and its surrounding infrastructure broadly has Spanish as its dominant de facto language. Any thoughts regarding that idea? @Zzyzx11: if it hasn’t been mentioned at all in previous discussions, and if there are significant differences between the digital process of mainstream English language keyboarding vs mainstream Spanish language keyboarding, it offers a compelling new argument. Mrbeastmodeallday (talk) 11:11, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Since this is the English Wikipedia, I would assume that most readers and editors would still be using an English language keyboards/device, not a Spanish one, regardless if they are in the U.S. or in other countries. And thus a typical English-speaking reader or editor in Australia, Canada, the UK, or other English-speaking countries besides the U.S. would still be likely hitting the "e" (without the accent) key even if they are searching for any topic regarding San Jose, Costa Rica or any other topic that has the "é" (with the accent) because of the inconvenience. Furthermore, WP:DIACRITICS, the guideline regarding the use of modified letters such as accents or other diacritics in article titles, states that "Search engines are problematic unless their verdict is overwhelming; modified letters have the additional difficulties that some search engines will not distinguish between the original and modified forms, and others fail to recognize the modified letter because of optical character recognition errors". And that is probably also why both WP:DIACRITICS and MOS:DIACRITICS (the relevant Manual of Style section) state that you should "provide redirects from alternative forms that use or exclude diacritics". So no, I do not agree you on this. Regardless of whether you are an English speaker in the U.S. or another country, it is inconvenient to enter the "é" with the accent; and most users may not immediately know the difference because of search engines and optical character recognition errors, or because the accent may be too small to be noticeable when displayed on their device. Maybe it is easy for you to enter the "é" with the accent or notice it on your screen, but for an elderly or handicapped person in Australia, trying to rely on screen readers and speech recognition software, it may become an accessibility issue if the software cannot easily make the distinguish because they are only programmed to understand the common English alphabet without any diacritic marks. So per those two guidelines I just mentioned, San Jose should redirect to San José, or vice versa, not split up. Zzyzx11 (talk) 12:24, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
And since we are dealing with a disambiguation page, the first bullet point in WP:DABCOMBINE generally says that "terms that differ only in capitalization, punctuation and diacritic marks ... should almost always share a disambiguation page". There are only a handful of entries listed without the accent, plus many subjects related to the California city can be spelled either way, so it does not make sense to split them and have redundancy. Zzyzx11 (talk) 17:20, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Two quick questions:
  • Do you know how the Spanish language WP is disambiguated for the “San Jose/San José” search term?
  • You mention the policy stating that "terms that differ only in capitalization, punctuation and diacritic marks ... should almost always share a disambiguation page" – Do you know why the 0.1%, 0.5%, 2% break the “ALMOST ALWAYS” rule in this case? (Compared to the default mainstream 98-99.9% that follow the rule)
@Zzyzx11: Thanks Mrbeastmodeallday (talk) 18:31, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  1. 1, You can see for yourself how the Spanish Wiki disambiguates es:San José and es:San Jose. Not that it makes much of a difference with regards to English. #2, are these numbers based on some evidence or are you just pulling things out of thin air because you think it helps your case? older ≠ wiser 18:44, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, where are those figures coming from, not that any such figures will help change my mind? Generally speaking, I have been citing various Wikipedia guidelines where "occasional exceptions may apply" based on forming a consensus when applying them to each individual situation like this one, not Wikipedia policies that are "standards all users should normally follow". I do not think an exception should apply in this particular case. As for es:San Jose currently redirecting to es:San José, whatever the Spanish Wikipedia is doing should be irrelevant to what is happening here on the English Wikipedia, even if they are doing the same thing, primarily because the common usage of each respective language may be different. They are using parenthetical disambiguation titles like es:San José (Costa Rica) and es:San José (California) for cities instead of comma-separated disambiguation that we use here, and they apparently do not need to list both cities at the top of es:San José before any other listings like we have to do on our disambiguation page. But again, the Spanish Wikipedia's es:Wikipedia:Convenciones de títulos policy and es:Wikipedia:Ambigüedad en títulos guidelines should do what is in the best interest for Spanish language readers, while the Wikipedia:Article titles policy and Wikipedia:Disambiguation guidelines here should do what is in the best interest for English language readers. Zzyzx11 (talk) 20:34, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • A community ban was placed on the OP on 10 June, based on issues unrelated to this one (diff). So unless there are any other editors supporting the OP regarding these San José pages, I would consider this discussion closed, keeping the status quo. Zzyzx11 (talk) 02:31, 21 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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