On Tuesday 19 November 2002 06:35 pm, Toby Bartels wrote:
Zoe wrote in part:
Well, no, I disagree that "*everyone* agrees" the names are incorrect. In your example of Confucius, should we use the old-style Chinese transliteration or the new version?
This isn't an argument that "Confucius" is incorrect, but rather that it's not quite clear what *is* correct instead. If any Chinese version is *more* correct than "Confucius" (a point that I admit that many here would deny), then any Chinese version would be an improvement, even if still not perfect.
Very wrong. What is most correct in English is the form used and recognized by the greatest number of English speakers. Dictionary makers realize this and make changes that reflect widest usage. This is an organic process that changes with time and we should prefer the terms and forms that are most useful to the greatest number of English speakers.
Should we not transliterate at all but force those who only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only being able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?
Nobody will be *forcing* any user to do anything of the sort. Every article should have all common spellings (English and original) in boldface in the first paragraph (we do this now if we know enough to), and they should have redirects from all of these that are in Latin-1 (we do this now too if we know enough to). Searching will work; linking will work -- no matter who wins.
I have to agree with Zoe here. Back in March, April and May I moved many hundreds of articles from incorrectly named titles to correct ones per our naming conventions. Many of these were from overly complex non-English forms to forms that most English speakers would understand and find useful (Google's language tools were and still are a useful resource in this regard). I can't remember a single instance where the author of the non-Anglicized titled article made a redirect from the Anglicized title.
In short: If most English speakers on both sides of the pond know a term by a certain spelling, then why have a convention that places the article on that term at a pedanticly "correct" spelling and then has to rely on redirects for what most people use? Remember the "surprise factor": users should not be surprised by where a link takes them.
That is not what redirects are for. Redirects are for doing the exact opposite - to catch non-standard alternate forms that are not as used as widely as the main form. That is why my idea of "redirect priority" never caught on as a way to make my proposed city naming convention work (in which Paris would be at [[Paris]] redirect to [[Paris, France]]). I learned the error of my ways. Please learn from my "redirect fallacy" mistake.
decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?
Nobody is proposing this, any more than anybody is proposing that his name should be given ONLY in English. Rather, the question is which form is to be *preferred*, in particular which form is to be the article title. Every form will be (and is currently, when set up correctly) *supported*.
-- Toby
What is and should be preferred is the title that is most likely to be linked to spontaneously in articles and what is most likely to be searched for. Please don't try to make contributing and using Wikipedia more difficult than it needs be by going down the opposite route.
This idea of yours is also more complicated than you might think: There are many competing transliteration of many non-English terms. Which should we use? What about non-Latin charsets? It only seems logical to allow them so that we can have the exact name of things (there are also competing non-Latin charsets).
This is madness and not at all useful -- leave the pedantic language lessons in the article itself. Technical matters that touch on ease of linking, using and searching for articles trump using the native forms any day.
There is no reason to belittle the intelligence of users and unnecessarily surprise them by having articles at non-English titles. This is the English language Wikipedia, so lets stop the sillyness and title things in *shock, horror* English.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)