|From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net |X-Accept-Language: en-us |Sender: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org |Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org |Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:01:50 -0800 | |Tucci wrote: | |>I stumbled across the talk page at Vodun a week ago |>or so, and some IP asked if it was the same thing as |>Voodoo and if so, if the article should be moved there |>because Voodoo is the more commonly used term. That |>led me to the following conclusion: |> |>I'd like to propose a minor modification to the |>current naming conventions that I think will make a |>lot of the different sides happy. If experts in a |>field nearly universally use a different term than the |>general population, the expert term should be used to |>name the article. The only two I can think of that |>this would apply to is Vodun and Inuit instead of |>Voodoo and Eskimo. Asking my seven reasonably |>educated co-workers, six out of the seven have no idea |>what Vodun is (though they've heard of Voodoo) and one |>thought it was the capital of "one of them southeast |>Asian countries" (for those keeping score, seven out |>of eight paramedics are unfamiliar with the word, with |>myself the only exception). Four out of the seven |>were familiar with the word "Inuit" but said they |>probably wouldn't think to use it. Three claim to |>have never heard it before, though all seven knew what |>an Eskimo was. Because experts in the field of |>religion and anthropology use "Vodun" and "Inuit" to |>the complete exclusion of "Voodoo" and "Eskimo" |>(except maybe to explain that they're the same thing |>at the beginning of an essay or paper or whatever), I |>think the Wikipedia would seem a bit... well, dumb, |>having an article about Eskimos when everybody |>involved with the people in question refer to them as |>Inuit. |> |The terms Eskimo and Inuk are not equivalent. Properly used the term |Eskimo is a broader one of whom the Inuit are a subset. The term Inuit |does not apply to those people who are in the more western, Siberian |part of the range. People in the eastern part of the range consider the |use of "Eskimo" as politically incorrect, and if they had their way |would probably also insist on changing the name of the Edmonton football |team. The best approach would be to move the material to two separate |articles that reflect the different usages. | |Polls of a small local groups about what terms they know does not strike |me as a sound basis for deciding what name(s) we should use. | |I am very much less certain about usage of voodoo/vodun. I've always |considered that vodun was the Dahomean language word for God and that |voodoo was derived from that. You are probably right to put everything |under "vodun". |
Inspired by this, I just added to the [[Saami]] article that these people find "Lapp" very offensive.
Tom P. O88