With the exception of a cold snap around Christmas, it’s been a very mild winter here in Washington, DC. Still, it’s nice to think of somewhere warmer. Bangkok, perhaps. We had a request from Jamie King, a public librarian in Illinois, to provide for Bangkok in Table 2 due to high literary warrant.
According to Wikipedia, “Bangkok is among the world's top tourist destinations, and has been named the world's most visited city consistently in several international rankings.” It’s also a major example of a primate city. That’s a fun concept to share with any geography nerds in your life (I say, as one of them), where a city is disproportionately large in population and influence within a country. In fact, Bangkok is ten times larger than Chiang Mai, the country’s second largest city.
You see where I’m going with this. This week, we authorized T2—5933 Bangkok, continued from T2—593 Thailand. Now you can express Bangkok wherever standard subdivisions are used. While the basic structure of 930-990 is built from Table 2 anyway, we also explicitly gave 959.33 Bangkok, for the history of the city, and special provisions to express specific concepts (e.g., ethnic groups) or time periods in it.
When we develop a country in Table 2, we usually give all of its first-level subdivisions, which the editorial rules allow. Why didn’t we do that with Thailand? The simple answer is that with more than 70 provinces, it would have taken a while, and there’s strong literary warrant for Bangkok now. In consultation with volunteer Winton Matthews, we identified the 3-subdivision specifically as where we’d put Bangkok anyway if we had developed for the whole country. And again, because of its importance, it would have had four-digit T2 notation directly under the main Thailand number regardless.
There’s one other country where we’ve given a single subdivision in Table 2. Can you find it?
Recent Comments