On Monday 09 December 2002 04:00 am, Larry Sanger wrote:
A comment from Mav (whose judgment and hard work I admire virtually always :-) ) suddenly turned a light on in my head (i.e., I had a sudden realization)....
Thank you. Coming from you I consider that to be a great compliment.
.... I think I understand now why Mav and some others were so seemingly (to me) peremptory about the issue. It's because they are working on [[WikiProject Countries]], and they take it to be in they brief to find the appropriate short form name of every country on the list. I suspect the people at work on this WikiProject see "People's Republic of China" and say, quite reasonably, that people call the PRC "China"--that's the popular name. Similarly for the case of "Republic of Ireland" and "Ireland. But again, that doesn't mean that "China" always means the PRC, or that "Ireland" always means the Republic. The PRC and the Republic have been around for less than 100 years, and China per se and Ireland per se are ancient and far greater and ultimately more important than the modern states.
Yes, I guess this is the main reason why Jeronimo, me et al. favored China = PRC. We developed a naming convention for countries that was an extension of the official common name naming convention. Our focus for the WkiProject is on the modern states so I guess we lost the big picture.
...... In the context of an encyclopedia, it seems pretty obvious that "China" should be used to mean China--not just part of it--*all* of China, its whole history, its many languages, its people (all of them), etc. This, unfortunately or not, means that the article about the modern state, the PRC, cannot dominate the page called [[China]]. Similarly, the article about the modern state, the Republic of Ireland, cannot dominate the page called [[Ireland]]. China and Ireland as topics are much bigger than those states.
As you should know from reading [[talk:Ireland]] I've already expressed the opinion that [[Ireland]] should be about the island, Irish culture, music and ancient history. The republic and northern UK-dependent territory should have their own articles.
This issue and reading your email provoked me to reevaluate my previous position on China (thus my silence on this issue so far - which is very unusual considering this is a naming issue).
It should be noted, though, that what you state above is not as obvious as you may think:
Princeton University's WordNet Dictionary China n 1: a communist nation that covers a vast territory in eastern Asia; the most populous country in the world
Also, Britannica Concise http://education.yahoo.com/search/be?lb=t&p=url%3Ac/china
Republic, E Asia. Area: 3,700,000 sq mi (9,583,000 sq km). Population (1997 est.): 1,227,740,000). Capital: Beijing. ....
Of course we aim to be better than Britannica and other sources. So I guess it comes down to how much work we want to do and whether or not we want to be lumpers or dividers. I've always been more of a divider myself so what you say above has a certain appeal to me. (NOTE: Much of previous debate on this was based on NPOV issues relating to Taiwan's claims. I was also reacting to a suggestion that [[China]] be turned into just a disambiguation page! This made me see red and probably clouded my judgement.).
You also mention a very valid ambiguity issue; China and the PRC really are two different things in spite of common usage. The reason is that the vast majority of Chinese history and the development of Chinese, art, science and culture occurred before the PRC. As our naming conventions state; "..article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity.." I now see ambiguity that needs to be corrected.
So I favor moving [[History of China]] to [[China]] and moving [[China]] to [[People's Republic of China]]. This will require some work on all the affected articles though (a lot of text needs to be rearranged and moved around). Then the history of the PRC will officially start in 1949 with an explanation of the major events of the revolution that preceded it. [[China]] will then be the main article that will introduce all things Chinese and link to more detailed articles on various topics - which includes the current republic at [[People's Republic of China]].
But now we have a bigger problem; What about France, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Mexico, and many many other nations whose current government was started way after our histories on them begin? With the new logic, it doesn't seem appropriate to have [[History of the French Republic]] mention Louis XIV or Napoleon. Or the history of the United States of Mexico say much about the Aztecs. This will require a great deal of work to sort out and can't be solved by just renaming articles.
Yours in the WikiWay,
Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma payment. Have you had your Wiki today? http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Starck (new) http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Huguenot&diff=475924&old...