[WikiEN-l] Synonymous article ID replacing redirects

[Tony Sidaway]

On 11/15/05, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   Perhaps I am missing something, but wouldn't organizing articles in this
> fashion simply push the argument back upon every article that links to the one
> with the contentious name?
>
>   Right now we have a situation in which these debates can be more-or-less
> solved by knowing what the subject's "Wikipedia article name" is, and informing
> people to not link through a redirect.  If Ivory Coast/Cote d'Ivoire become
> equivalent at the backend level, won't the same argument then erupt in the
> "List of African countries" article, the "List of UN members" article, and the
> "List of places with Ivory in their name" article?

Maybe it's me who's missing something, but isn't that the kind of
thing that can be solved by normal editing and dispute resolution?

The only reason we have a debate on this kind of issue is because
sometimes moves *cannot*  be performed by a normal editor, due to the
redirect in the desired target of the move having history.

Moreover the concept of an "official wikipedia name" doesn't exist. 
It doesn't really matter to Wikipedia what the article is called; if
you want to refer to it by another name, use the piped link feature
[[Article name|preferred name]].

So all we'd be doing here is providing a facility to give an article a
number of different names.  Using the redirect method, currently if
you type in Ivory Coast you see somethiing like this:

Côte d'Ivoire
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Ivory Coast)

The Republic of Côte d'Ivoire (IPA /kot divwa/); commonly called Ivory
Coast in English; see below about the name) is a country in West
Africa.

With synonyms, you'd see something like the following:

Ivory Coast
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Republic of Côte d'Ivoire (IPA /kot divwa/); commonly called Ivory
Coast in English; see below about the name) is a country in West
Africa.