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_mytho…
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