On 11/13/05, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
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.
not is isn't. Read what the MOS has to
say.
This is a racist slur for which you owe everyone
an apology.
The french speaking people of the world
are now a
race? Uh okeey.
Please avoid the use of abbreviations. They only
make your comments
> more difficult to read.
Manual of style Nameing conventions
Determining the official name of a country is not
a matter for voting.
It is a sure way of having facts overwhelmed by
ignorance.
We are not decideing it's offcial name. We are
deciding how many
people on wikipedia are incaple of following naming
policy. Current
total is 21. The nameing conventions say "article
naming should give
priority to what the majority of English speakers
would most easily
recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity,
while at the same
time making linking to those articles easy and
second nature."
--
geni
Correct. Indeed what is going on that debate is
symtomatic of just how many people don't know the MoS
and the naming conventions, and take offence if
someone points them out.
Some of the zanier arguments defending the less widely
used French name being used in place of the far more
widely used English are how:How
everyone uses it (demonstably untrue).
everyone SHOULD use it. (which breaks NPOV. It isn't
our job to say what they SHOULD do, just what they DO
do.)
I use it, therefore obviously the rest of the planet
does to.
I've only heard it being called that (if you are a
French speaker and you deal with French speakers from
that country, of course you would only have heard it
called that. But this is english wikipedia!)
It would be stupid not to.
All articles SHOULD be written this way (ie, it
doesn't matter that they aren't. Lets make up a new
rule for this page!)
We have to do what the government says (no we don't.
We don't name any other country based on what their
government demands, but on english speakers' usage!)
The fact that Wikipedia has a set of strict rules for
naming pages doesn't seem to matter to most of the
'keep the French name' voters. It does seem suspicious
that a group of French speakers can vote to ensure
that a less well known French name is given priority
over a far more widely name, internationally used,
English version, on English Wikipedia, no matter what
the factual evidence is, what the name conventions
state or what the manual of style requires.
Thom
It is notable
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