mav-
William of Ockham should reside under that title, as he does, which
makes
the fact that "Occam's" Razor is misspelled even more egregious.
Hm. You had to mention a specific case. Which academics are you going to let decide this one? Many different disciplines lay some claim to the concept of Occam's Razor and many of these disciplines use one of two different spellings. Mathematicians and scientists generally use the Latinized spelling while most historians use the "Ockham" spelling. Which academics do you think are correct?
I do not think there is any actual disagreement about the spelling of Ockham's name. Some academics simply use the spelling "Occam's Razor" by convention; in that, they are no different than other people who use that spelling. The question we should ask for which title to use is (in this case and others): Is there any factual disagreement that this name is correct? In this case, one side says "Look, the guy's name is William of Ockham, not Occam, it's silly to spell the philosophical concept differently". The other side says "Maybe, but we've been spelling it Occam for so long, we're not going to change it now". So we have one historically correct spelling, and one which is somewhat more popular. It's hard to find a threshold, but unless there's an order of magnitude of difference in popularity, I think it's proper for us to use (and redirect to) the correct spelling.
It would be different if the mathematicians said: "No, we also spell William of Occam that way, because we generally latinize names". Then we should fall back on popularity because there's an actual controversy about which term is historically correct. But there isn't.
In cases where the common name of a subject is misleading (For example: [[Pennsylvania Dutch]] is misleading since it really is a dialect of German), then it is sometimes reasonable to fall back on a well-accepted alternative ([[Pennsylvania German]], for example). Also, some terms are in common usage but are unreasonably offensive to large groups of people (Eskimo, Black American and Mormon Church, for example).. In those cases use widely known
alternatives (Inuit, African-American, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, for example).
This does not mean that we should avoid using widely-known pseudonyms like
Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Billy the Kid, or widely-known common names of
animals and other things. But it does mean that we need to temper common usage when the commonly used term is unreasonably misleading or offensive to one or more groups of people.
I could accept that rephrasing.
PS I just did a spell check and "Ockham" came up as a misspelling but "Occam" did not.
Bad spellchecker. See http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=occam
Regards,
Erik