Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
Anyhow, if you have opinions on the matter - or, *sigh*, if you want to use this vote as a proxy to express your blanket opposition to non-English characters in article titles - here's the location again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Norse_mythol...)
Thanks for pointing this out---it's sort of a tricky edge case. In the extremes it's obvious what we should do: If there's a common English name, it goes there, and if the name is *obviously* in a foreign alphabet, then it gets transliterated one way or another (nobody supports having even obscure Greek cities on the English Wikipedia having titles in the Greek alphabet).
With alphabets that are mostly like the one used in English but with a few different characters it's more tricky---is an alphabet with a thorn or an eszet "close enough" to keep as is, or more like a completely foreign letter that should be transliterated like Greek (or Chinese)? I would probably lean towards transliterating---thorn and eszet and whatnot aren't really characters used in English any more than beta or gamma are. It does introduce some ambiguity (is the 'th' a thorn or something else?), but that always happens---nearly every Greek name has 2-3 different ways to write it ([[Veria]], Veroia, Beroea, Berea), but that's not a good reason to use [[Βέροια]], even if that would be nicer from the point of view of anyone who knows the Greek alphabet.
-Mark