[WikiEN-l] need to work out clear policies on MANDATORY and OPTIONAL rules on WP

[Tom Cadden]

Where sites allowed, all the usage measured was focused on the last five years. In newspaper usage, some US newspaper usage was measured as in what they used in 2005. Individual documents from the State Department were picked that dated from the last three years. (Many were from the last six months.) One European newspaper's usage was reviewed from 1st May 2005 to 1st November 2005. In fact some evidence (not included in the calculated) suggests that usage of Cote d'Ivoire peeked around 18 months after the government demand that it alone be used. News agencies probably tried to use it, found their readers rejected the usage, and returned to the usage their readers understood. 
 
 New names are introduced all the time. Their impact usually follows one of a set of routes:
 
 * immediate adoption
 * slow adoption over time
 * immediate rush to adopt, followed by a quick abandonment
 * equilibrium between old and new versions. 
 * failure of a new term to take off and its eventual dropping. 
 
 Most usage when examined suggests that Cote d'Ivoire seems to have been either 3 or 5, depending on the source. Even the Economist, which championed its usage primarily because its largest market is among the business community who might be investing or interested in investing in the state, and so who in the magazine's eyes needed to use the government-preferred name, has started to return to Ivory Coast. Even the US State Department in the last two years has returned to using Ivory Coast in all but the most formal diplomatic discourses. Speeches by among others the Secretary of State, which are aimed at the media  and so at the public, use Ivory Coast predominantly. Cote d'Ivoire's usage is largely restricted to private inter-state and Letter of Credence usage. 

Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote: Tom Cadden wrote:

> 
> It is one of the clearest open and shut cases imaginable. Put in ordinary language, the ordinary English speaker on the planet uses Ivory Coast not Cote d'Ivoire. Those that use the latter are aware of the former. Those that use the former are rarely aware of the latter. Under MoS criteria the only place the article can be placed at is Ivory Coast. But as the vote shows, most users aren't using MoS criteria but deciding on personal whims such as 'I like it', 'that's what I hear', 'it is what will become popular', and the even more POV 'we should help encourage its usage'. None of that fits the criteria of the MoS and means that that one article is in a different location to 99% of other such articles on WP, which follow most common usage, not personal agendas. 
>
Stating your case more forcefully doesn't qualify as evidence. Since
you don't describe your sources of information, it's impossible to tell
whether you are talking about current usage or past usage - use of old
documents will by definition skew results to an old name, and we would
then be required to still use "Zaire", "Upper Volta", etc until the pile
of new documents outweighed the pile of old ones.

Stan

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