On 11/19/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
If you want to create a credible encyclopædia and not a semi-literate, semi-credible, semi-accurate joke. YES.
This is rather disproportionate, don't you think? I am rather surprised that a little debate of which of two names for a small African country should be used, either of which would be quite IMO acceptable as an article title, is creating this much heat. Wikipedia will not seem more or less literate, credible or accurate because we use [[Cote d'Ivoire]] instead of [[Ivory Coast]], or the other way round.
As many people have pointed out, 'Use common names' is a general GUIDELINE for Wikipedia, which we do not, in fact, follow completely. Many subject areas, supplementary naming conventions, or WikiProjects define naming conventions that do not follow Use Common Names.
-Matt Brown