You keep saying that it's unprofessional to use the terms you don't like (not those which are incorrect, because that's only your interpretation), but you haven't responded to my pointing out that Britannica, perhaps the most professional of encyclopedias, calls it Pennsylvania Dutch. Zoe Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:Mav-
Anglicization is the process by which foreign words are altered and enter into common usage by English speakers. If you support this form of common usage then why do you not support common usage when presented with two words which are already in English?
If one of these words is an obvious linguistic error, and the other one is commonly used among academics, it is clear that we should use the latter. I repeat, it is not POV to highlight the correct term if nobody factually disagrees that it is correct (besides, arguably, no matter which name we choose, we always take a POV in the process, it is just whether we go by Google, or by what is more accepted among scholars).
As the example of [[Pennsylvania German]] shows, people in other articles prefer linking to the correct term, not the incorrect one. From that perspective alone using the more correct term is justified. You yourself constantly use the linkability argument.
By extending the logic you propose all animals in Wikipedia should be under their scientific names, [[Mark Twain]] would be under [[Samuel Langhorn Clemens]], [[Linda Lovelace]] under [[Linda Boreman]], [[Billy the Kid]] under [[William Henry Bonney]], [[Eva Peron]] under [[Mar�a Evita Durante de Peron]], [[Marilyn Monroe]] under [[Norma Jeane Mortenson]].
Names of people, cities, tribes and so on are decided by popular usage and, in case of people, by themselves; academic opinion is of less importance here. There is nothing wrong with pseudonyms, and if people are primarily known under these pseudonyms, then that is the title we should use. It is also the more likely one to be linked. Names that are, however, in error (e.g. of historical persons) should not be used where there is a reasonable scholarly alternative.
William of Ockham should reside under that title, as he does, which makes the fact that "Occam's" Razor is misspelled even more egregious.
Oh yeah, it is also misleading to call an orca a killer whale since they are not whales and the term "sea lion" is also misleading since these animals have
nothing to do with lions.
That depends on which term is used by biologists.
Academics also disagree -- which ones do we listen to?
If there's substantial disagreement, we can fall back on the common name rule.
Many also prefer foreign language forms. Should we use those because some academics think so?
Most academics prefer anglicized names. However, we should avoid losing information, so we should call an article about J�rg Haider either "J�rg Haider" or "Joerg Haider", but not "Jorg Haider".
Getting rid of the common usage naming convention opens the floodgates to these type of arguments.
Not necessarily this type of argument, but yes, it makes our conventions more complex. As they should be: Finding the right title for an article should not be as simple as throwing a few keywords at Google. It is a process where different factors have to be weighed against each other. These factors are:
1) Is the term based on a misconception or outdated convention and therefore avoided by scholars? 2) Which title will other articles want to use for linking? 3) Which title will people want to search for (which is most popular)?
If there is disagreement on 1) or 2), we ignore them.
Abandoning common usage would make it more difficult to directly link to articles and find them.
No, because we should only abandon it in cases where common usage is incorrect and we therefore do not want to use the incorrect term for linking either. We will usually want to link to [[Marilyn Monroe]] using that name, but it is unprofessional to use an incorrect name in other articles, and therefore avoided.
Above all else the name we choose should be the one that will attract the largest number of eyes and fill the largest number of edit links -- without having to deal with redirects.
We have to deal with redirects in any case.
We are not writing an encyclopedia for academics and specialists, we are witting an encyclopedia for use by the masses.
That doesn't mean that we have to make the same mistakes as the masses :^)
Page titles should reflect common usage in order to ensure our content is exposed to the largest possible audience.
As I have repeatedly demonstrated, it does not "ensure" that significantly more than using the correct term.
Regards,
Erik