1: I'd like to formally request sysop status. 2: I stumbled across the talk page at Vodun a week ago or so, and some IP asked if it was the same thing as Voodoo and if so, if the article should be moved there because Voodoo is the more commonly used term. That led me to the following conclusion:
I'd like to propose a minor modification to the current naming conventions that I think will make a lot of the different sides happy. If experts in a field nearly universally use a different term than the general population, the expert term should be used to name the article. The only two I can think of that this would apply to is Vodun and Inuit instead of Voodoo and Eskimo. Asking my seven reasonably educated co-workers, six out of the seven have no idea what Vodun is (though they've heard of Voodoo) and one thought it was the capital of "one of them southeast Asian countries" (for those keeping score, seven out of eight paramedics are unfamiliar with the word, with myself the only exception). Four out of the seven were familiar with the word "Inuit" but said they probably wouldn't think to use it. Three claim to have never heard it before, though all seven knew what an Eskimo was. Because experts in the field of religion and anthropology use "Vodun" and "Inuit" to the complete exclusion of "Voodoo" and "Eskimo" (except maybe to explain that they're the same thing at the beginning of an essay or paper or whatever), I think the Wikipedia would seem a bit... well, dumb, having an article about Eskimos when everybody involved with the people in question refer to them as Inuit. I don't think this rule would apply to most of what has been discussed, kings and queens and satellites and latin vs common names and all, but just to these two and maybe a handful of other cases ("The Beatles" vs "The White Album", "Myanmar" vs "Burma" maybe).
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