[WikiEN-l] Re: need to work out clear policies on MANDATORYandOPTIONAL

[Craig Schiller]

> They follow their own MoS. We follow ours. Ours is not business based but
> based exclusively on the most common name principle.

Well, not exclusively. There are quite a few subject areas where
Wikipedia quite explicitly spells out that something other than the
"most common name" is the naming convention in that particular case.

Television and radio stations in North America, for example, are
required by policy to be titled by their official W---, K---, C--- or
X---- callsigns, even though a strict application of "most common
name" would require that they be titled with things like "Fox 25",
"CTV Toronto" or "The Beat 94.5".

It's quite common to disambiguate people with the same first name and
last name by adding a middle name to the title even if that middle
name isn't in particularly common use. (And it would be impossible or
excessively confusing, in some cases, to use another point of
disambiguation -- frex, there's been more than one Canadian politician
named Angus Macdonald, so the typical dab format, "Angus Macdonald
(Canadian politician)", would *still* have to be a dab page.)

It's patently obvious that in general day-to-day use, Laura
Schlessinger and Phil McGraw are *vastly* more commonly referred to to
as "Dr. Laura" and "Dr. Phil" than by their full names, and yet their
articles are located at their full names.

We use Inuit rather than Eskimo, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints rather than Mormon Church, on the stated grounds that "we need
to temper common usage when the commonly used term is unreasonably
misleading or commonly regarded as offensive".

And a very real case could be made that in day-to-day English
conversational usage, "Holland" is still technically a more common
name for the country than "the Netherlands", but for obvious reasons
nobody who valued their reputation as a Wikipedia editor would even
*think* of suggesting anything other than "the Netherlands" as that
article's title.

And on and so forth. Most common name is not an inviolable rule; it's
a *guideline*, and one which is already *not* regarded as the final
word in every single situation.

There are already a *lot* of circumstances in which other
considerations trump "most common name", so can we *please* stop
pretending that "Côte d'Ivoire" somehow represents some unprecedented
blasphemy against Wikipedia's Great Unbreakable Commandment?

Craig