On 8 Sept K P wrote: I agree with you, I honestly do, but consider the challenge I face in my little corner of Wikipedia: it is the exception, not the rule, that a given placename has several spellings & at least one alternative name. Having only one name spelled one way per town, mountain, river -- & even person -- would make my research much easier, let alone naming articles. Part of the problem is that there is no standardized method of transliterating words from the Ethiopian script, & the rest of the problem is that every nationality often has its own name for many places in that country. And these differences in transliteration are often not trivial: last week I wrote an article on a village whose name has been spelled "Imi", "Imay" & "Hinna". (All are in relatively common use.) Even the capital of that country, Addis Ababa, has its own variant spelling (Addis Abeba), & a common alternative name (Finfinne -- what the largest nationality in Ethiopia insist the city should be called). Follow what the experts do? Well, the experts also differ amongst themselves, but add th ecomplication of unicode characters; further, I've seen more than expert spell the same town or landmark different ways in different books. This could be a real mess if it weren't for the fact the few of us working on that topic tend to be rather easy-going about the issue -- & by default, I get to make the decisions because I'm writing the articles. If you can come up with a better way to provide this information than using those ugly parantheses, I'm all ears. But until then, I'll stick with them. At least it's consistent, so if someone does come up with a better way, it'll be much simpler to fix. Geoff