An interesting row is going on at [[Talk:Côte d'Ivoire]]. The country is usually known in English as Ivory Coast but is controversially at its little-used-in-English French name. A proposal by me supported by Ed Poor to move it to the more widely used English name, to follow the standard naming rules, produced the mother of all rows, with users queuing to claim that 'everyone' calls it Cote d'Ivoire.
That argument was clearly disproved. Checks on websites with the BBC, New York Times, ABC, South African television, Australian newspapers, the Times of London, the Guardian, NBC, Bloomberg, the British Foreign Office, etc shows that worldwide Ivory Coast is more used in some cases by a factor of 10. Only the US State Department uses the French name, and even then just occasionally, a far cry from the 'always' claimed.
Even then the majority was queuing up to insist the French name be kept, no matter what. But a closer look showed that a large number of those voting to keep the French name were French speakers! French and English are famous rivals to be the dominant world language, but is it a first for a English Wikipedia article to be kept at a little used French name rather than the widely used English version contrary to WP NCs and the MoS, by a block vote of French speakers defending the French language?
What is WP policy when language is used to a block vote to force the MoS and NC to be ignored in an article's name?
Thom
PS: The vote is still going on. Please come and vote.
___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com