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

[Andrew Gray]

On 14/11/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:

> 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.

...wait a second. Unless I misread that talk page, the majority of the
voters on both sides are Anglophone - I recognise many of the names. I
fail to see how this is "a vote of users of one particular language
... intent on their defence of that language". Unless that language is
English, of course.

Unless I've become part of the grand Francophone conspiracy, along
with a good number of native English speakers I recognise voting on
there, it's hard to read this sort of complaint as anything but a
bad-faith accusation and an attempt to circumvent a process to obtain
consensus *which you yourself initiated*. If you will resort to
voting, please have the common decency not to try and undermine it
when you dislike what the community seems to be saying.

As Sam says below, this is an issue of interpretation of a clear and
sensible rule which is, in this case, ambiguous. We had the same over
Gdansk/Danzig, over Gasoline/Petrol, over Alumin(i)um, a score of
other pages. I have no doubt that a sizable proportion of people on
both sides of those disputes knew for a fact that they were right
about their preferred usage being vastly more common, and quoted
specific searches to prove it.

(History, of course, records that at least half of them must have been wrong.)

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk