[WikiEN-l] Another rule literalism problem

[Ian Woollard]

2008/6/25 Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net>:
> Talk:Tetsusaiga
> Talk:InuYasha#Naming_Conventions
>
> Summary: in the Inuyasha series, a sword is named the "Tessaiga".
>
> The English licensor made a mistake in the translation, calling it
> "Tetsusaiga".
>
> One person insists that because that is the official English translation,
> the article *must* be called by the incorrect name; moreover, since we don't
> have a reliable source for the name being a mistake, we can't even treat it
> like an incorrect name.  (Note that hiragana in Japanese is phonetic and the
> name lacks ambiguity.)

It's not about 'official' it's about *common* usage.

If you google it for example. I get 115,000 hits for Tetsusaiga, but
only 79,000 for Tessaiga, so it looks like the article should be at
Tetsusaiga, but with a significant second term Tessaiga mentioned at
the top of the article.

It's like dictionaries, they don't *define* a word, they just note
common usage. That's all encyclopedias do as well. If the translator
had made a mistake, but nobody used it, then it shouldn't be in the
wikipedia... but unfortunately...

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.