[WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting to ignore MoS, NCs for language reasons.

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Tom Cadden wrote:
> --- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Unlike many
>>other French-speaking 
>>countries the official name for English purposes is
>>the French one.  See 
>>the member list for the United Nations at 
>>http://www.un.org/Overview/unmember.html  This does
>>not mean that other 
>>French speaking countries follow the same practice. 
>>The Central African 
>>Republic does not appear as République
>>Centraficaine. 
> 
> That is irrelevant. The official name of the Republic
> of Ireland is Poblacht na hÉireann. We do not use it.
> Nor do we use the official name in French of the
> French Republic. We do have have the article on
> Germany at the Federal Republic of Germany, let alone
> the German language version of the name. 
> 
> WP does not use official names are article titles.
> With countries it uses common names, and puts the
> official name at the top of the article's infobox. 
> 

My understanding was that the Official Name in English, /as requested by
the Government of Côte d'Ivoire/, was Côte d'Ivoire. Not "Ivory Coast".
They changed their name to Côte d'Ivoire. End discussion. That's their
name. Use it. Redirects are cheap.

>>Maybe the US State Department is just following the
>>UN lead on this.  
>>The proportion of newspapers and websites using the
>>English name is 
>>irrelevant.  The position of official Ivoirian sites
>>is more influential.
> 
> 
> The position of Ivoirian sites is irrelevant. This is
> not an Ivoirian encyclopædia but an English language
> one that does not write its articles to suit
> governments and official sites. 
> 

Are you suggesting we should get rid of diacritical marks in article
names when the devs struggled so hard to make them work in the first place?

>>>Even then the majority was queuing up to insist the
>>>French name be kept, no matter what. But a closer
>>
>>look
>>
>>>showed that a large number of those voting to keep
>>
>>the
>>
>>>French name were French speakers! 
>>>
>>
>>This is a racist slur for which you owe everyone an
>>apology.
> 
> 
> Absolutely not. It is a fact that an article is being
> kept in a location against the explicit rules in the
> MoS but a vote of users of one particular language,
> many of whom seem intent on putting their defence of
> that language above Wikipedia's own rules. 
> 

I don't speak French. I voted for the "French" name. What does this say
about your logical phallacy?

> 
>>>What is WP policy when language is used to a block
>>>vote to force the MoS and NC to be ignored in an
>>>article's name? 
>>>
>>
>>Please avoid the use of abbreviations.  They only
>>make your comments 
>>more difficult to read.
> 
> 
> People on WP regularly use MoS for Manual of Style and
> NC for Naming Conventions.  
> 

Go read BEANS then. Just because you /can/, doesn't mean you /should/.

> 
>>Determining the official name of a country is not a
>>matter for voting.  
>>It is a sure way of having facts overwhelmed by
>>ignorance.
> 
> I'm surprised you don't know that WP policy IS to
> decide the location of an article by voting. It is
> done through requesting moves and voting on them. It
> is a standard procedure used throughout WP. 
>  
> 

[[m:Voting is evil]].

-- 
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