[WikiEN-l] Naming convention under vote

[Delirium]

Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:

>Anyhow, if you have opinions on the matter - or, *sigh*, if you want to
>use this vote as a proxy to express your blanket opposition to non-English
>characters in article titles - here's the location again:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Norse_mythology)
>  
>
Thanks for pointing this out---it's sort of a tricky edge case. In the 
extremes it's obvious what we should do: If there's a common English 
name, it goes there, and if the name is *obviously* in a foreign 
alphabet, then it gets transliterated one way or another (nobody 
supports having even obscure Greek cities on the English Wikipedia 
having titles in the Greek alphabet).

With alphabets that are mostly like the one used in English but with a 
few different characters it's more tricky---is an alphabet with a thorn 
or an eszet "close enough" to keep as is, or more like a completely 
foreign letter that should be transliterated like Greek (or Chinese)? I 
would probably lean towards transliterating---thorn and eszet and 
whatnot aren't really characters used in English any more than beta or 
gamma are. It does introduce some ambiguity (is the 'th' a thorn or 
something else?), but that always happens---nearly every Greek name has 
2-3 different ways to write it ([[Veria]], Veroia, Beroea, Berea), but 
that's not a good reason to use [[Βέροια]], even if that would be nicer 
from the point of view of anyone who knows the Greek alphabet.

-Mark