[WikiEN-l] Being bold doesn't work anymore, or why our prose is so bad.

[Geoffrey Burling]

On 8 Sept K P wrote:
> On 9/7/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/8/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Use of parenthetical remarks in the intro paragraph is leading to
> > > these streams of other language words so long you can't find the
> > > introductory sentence--although they look less paranthetical when
> > > they're 27 words longer than the containing sentence.
> >
> > I guess I find this elegant:
> >
> > John Smith (1864-1899) was a....
> >
> > but you're right, this becomes heavy:
> > John Smith (born 1864 London, died 1899 Tunbridge Wells, England) was a...
> >
> > Birth and death dates are fundamental to any biography. Birth and
> > death locations can wait till later in the article.
> >
> I could compromise on years alone, but it's a give em 8 digits and a
> dash, and they'll take a dozen locations and alternative spellings
> situation.

I agree with you, I honestly do, but consider the challenge I face in 
my little corner of Wikipedia: it is the exception, not the rule, that 
a given placename has several spellings & at least one alternative 
name. Having only one name spelled one way per town, mountain, river -- 
& even person -- would make my research much easier, let alone naming 
articles.

Part of the problem is that there is no standardized method of 
transliterating words from the Ethiopian script, & the rest of the 
problem is that every nationality often has its own name for many places 
in that country. And these differences in transliteration are often 
not trivial: last week I wrote an article on a village whose name has 
been spelled "Imi", "Imay" & "Hinna". (All are in relatively common use.) 
Even the capital of that country, Addis Ababa, has its own variant 
spelling (Addis Abeba), & a common alternative name (Finfinne -- what 
the largest nationality in Ethiopia insist the city should be called). 
Follow what the experts do? Well, the experts also differ amongst 
themselves, but add th ecomplication of unicode characters; further, 
I've seen more than expert spell the same town or landmark different 
ways in different books. This could be a real mess if it weren't for 
the fact the few of us working on that topic tend to be rather 
easy-going about the issue -- & by default, I get to make the decisions 
because I'm writing the articles.

If you can come up with a better way to provide this information than 
using those ugly parantheses, I'm all ears. But until then, I'll stick 
with them. At least it's consistent, so if someone does come up with 
a better way, it'll be much simpler to fix.

Geoff