[WikiEN-l] need to work out clear policies on MANDATORYandOPTIONAL rules on WP

[Poor, Edmund W]

> From: Tom Cadden [mailto:thomcadden at yahoo.ie] 

> As has been pointed out repeatedly, the MoS does not say 'do 
> what Brittanica does' Brittanica is a business-orientated 
> hardcopy encyclopædia which follows governmental usage to 
> avoid offending native populations because it needs them to 
> buy their product. It is called sometimes 'Strategic Naming'. 
>  
>  They follow their own MoS. We follow ours. Ours is not 
> business based but based exclusively on the most common name 
> principle. Objective evidence shows that the most common name 
> of that state, as evidenced by surveys of communication 
> vehicles worldwide, is 'Ivory Coast' by a ratio of 85:15 over 
> Cote d'Ivoire. 
>  
>  They have to follow their MoS which follows 'Strategic 
> Naming'. We have to follow ours, which follows 'Most Common 
> Name'. Under our MoS the name we are obliged to place the 
> name at is Ivory Coast. Their MoS, following their criteria, 
> produces a result that is irrelevant to us. 

I don't actually care about this particular "country name", as much as I care about the larger issue. If we allow people to go against policy, and then require a majority vote (or supermajority vote) to choose to FOLLOW policy, then Wikipedia will quickly be over-run by abusers.

The article should be put at the policy-determined place (which happens to be "Ivory Coast") and then - IF a consensus developes that this particular country article should be an exception to policy, THEN move it to the French name.

The idea that article names should be dictated to us, by whoever the article happens to be about is NOT GOOD POLICY. It will only lead to balkanization of the 'pedia. We picked "most common usage English" specifically to head off this sort of thing.

Ed Poor