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

[Tom Cadden]

Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
I don't hear much complaining about the change away from the established 
English names of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.  When the news of last 
year's tsunami broke I had to pause to determine what this major 
affected city of Chennai was.

You still don't get it. The only issue is 'is a name widely used in English?' Those names are now widely used. If Ivory Coast was ever to become widely known to English users as Cote d'Ivoire rather than Ivory Coast then the page under MoS rules would have to be put at Cote d'Ivoire not Ivory Coast. It all depends on usage, not personal opinion, government order or anything else. The language doesn't matter. If English users predominantly use the native language name, then the article goes in as native language name. If English users predominantly use the English variant, the the article goes in as the English variant. 
 
 All that matters under WP MoS is usage. It is not for WP to decide what should be used. It is simply WP's job to use what IS used. And if what is used changes, we change the page. It could not be more simple. 
 
 For years the town of Kells in Ireland (the Meath one. There are two) was officially known as ''Ceananas Mór". NOBODY ever used that name. I lived there and it was an open joke that barely 0.001% of the population used the official name. In fact the signs outside town were constantly stolen by people who wanted to have a copy of a sign to what most people regarded as a non-existent place. Under your concept of how naming works, the article would be put there even though even 0% of Irish people, let alone people internationally, would have recognised the name. In the end the town council got fed up with a name that was a national joke and returned it to Kells, in the process pissing off the 'Ceananas Mor' supporters, all three of them if the numbers attending the 'defend our name' march was anything to go by. 
 
 Thom


		
---------------------------------
 Yahoo! Model Search  - Could you be the next catwalk superstar? Check out the competition now