I don't believe in countries blindly being given precedence over regions. And even if I support "precedence" that is not tied to how I would tag a country. I am in favour of pragmatically taking everything into account, from the point of view of a travel website.
For a useful comparison, think about Macedonia, which is a country, a region of Greece, and a region which encompasses both.
Pragmatically, we sometimes have to disambiguate. When talking about my travels in Georgia I often have to say "the country", and the person I met in Georgia (the country) from Georgia (the US state) often had to say both "the state" and "the country" depending on who she was talking to and what she was talking about.
I'm for unified solutions that work for more than one place / tag. I'm against "blindly" following some other authority, including the U.N., Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Lonely Planet. They don't just blindly copy each other. Each one weighs up the pros and cons from their perspective and comes up with a practical compromise that makes sense for their mission.
We should accept that we have to make compromises, and make them in ways that make sense for a travel-oriented website that wants to embrace the whole world, upsetting as few people as possible, supporting as little repression as possible, but realizing we can't make everybody 100% happy 100% of the time.
Therefore I am in favour of using the -country
disambiguation suffix when it makes sense for us.
- georgia-country makes sense and doesn't upset Georgians.
- macedonia-country makes sense probably only upsets some Macedonians and some Greeks, but all travellers will understand them without being confused.
They can be contrasted with:
Using a country's name as a suffix can be another principle we use over whenever it makes sense, as a kind of standard.
We do not need either as main tag, or as synonym:
Having the latter would surely upset some people. Doing the same for the former allows us to have a standard we apply to all similar situations without anyone credibly complaining that we take sides.
(For the same reason I'm also against our current america being a synonym for usa.)
Georgia Travel
, 8 of the first 10 results I get are about the US State. (The country is responsible for the second and fourth numerically, fwiw).