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

[K P]

On 9/12/07, Geoffrey Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
Just don't put them all in the first sentence, moving the second word
of the first sentence down past the bottom of the screen, that's all I
ask.

I look up transliterated geological place names from the Iranian
Plateau through southwestern Pakistan, so I know the troubles you
have.  Besides the fact of the multiple translisterations, the large
changes from the 19th to the early 20th to the mid-twentieth, is the
fact that Yakub had a lot of villages.

Kp