Chris Owen (ronthewarhero@yahoo.co.uk) [050622 09:14]:
We seem to have a lot of nationalist edit wars over placenames. I'm sure not many people will have forgotten the Gdansk/Danzig fiasco. A similar row is currently going on at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Macedonian_Slavs (Greeks and ex-Yugoslavs fighting over names, yet again; they're actively trolling for votes on Wikipedia and offline as well).
That's wonderful. If we have smoking-gun evidence of this, it should be added to the page to note the utter invalidity of the poll.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ChrisO/Naming_disputes
- The most common use in English of a name takes
precedence;
- If the common name conflicts with the official name,
use the common name ''except'' for conflicting scientific and dialect names;
- If neither the common name nor the official name is
prevalent, use the name (or a translation thereof) that the subject uses to describe itself or themselves. Objective criteria that should be considered are:
- Is the name in common usage in English?
- Is it the official current name of the subject
(official in terms of being used in a legal context, e.g. a constitution?)
- Is it the name used by the subject to describe
itself or themselves?
- If an historic name is mentioned in the article, is
it in an accurate context? Subjective criteria that should not be used are:
- Does the subject have a moral right to use the name?
- Does the subject have a legal right to use the name?
- Does the name infringe on someone else's legal or
moral rights?
- Is the use of the name politically unacceptable?
OH YES PLEASE. I think the above cut through the problem obviously and elegantly.
Of course, there's more to it than that - notably that really intractable disputes should be resolved by a neutral committee of administrators (not the ArbCom, which shouldn't waste its time on low-level disputes of this sort). The alternative is to put such questions to votes that will just end up being pissing contests between rival POV-pushers, which is what we're doing at the moment.
What they need is just someone with even a faint sense of proportion looking at them, and that's what the AC is chosen for (even if sometimes it's like the sausage factory on the inside). I don't think deciding per these criteria would unduly load us at present. It certainly beats cases warring over the proper number angels to set dancing on the head of a pin as per policy.
- d.