Stevertigo said in part:
Once again - referring to how confused people are. Well, Lir was right. The only people who disagree with that were people stuck in convention.
Oh was he? Cristóbal Colón is SPANISH but Columbus was born in Italian-speaking Genoa under the name Cristoforo Colombo. This underscores my point; Different languages have different words for the same thing. And pardon me if I'm stuck in the conventions of the English language.
But you do have some strong points to address - however, Im calling for a change of convention - Im not making claim that its *not conventional to simply follow convention. I'm calling to question the *merits of that convention - and whether its a convention from another era - say, 1672. (Before telephones, I might add.)
This convention is from this era. Here and now and used throughout the English-speaking world -- especially by native speakers. You are trying to subvert that by inputing your minority POV that names should be exactly like they are in the places from where the names originate. Sorry but that isn't going to happen since /most languages/ are written in non-Latin scripts that are completely unrecognizable by the great majority of English speakers.
The merits of the convention we use is that it follows already established conventions used throughout the English-speaking world. Different languages have different rules on pronunciation and rules of stress so when you present an English-speaking person not familiar with the language a given foreign word is in (even if it is in Latin-based script) what you are going to get from the mouth of that person is utter garbage that will vary from person to person. /That/ is exactly why many foreign words are Anglicized.
Well your toughest argument by far is based on a limitation of the En wikipedia to en "native English speakers" - again.
I did not limit en.wiki to native speakers. I merely said that whatever conventions we do use should have an emphasis on the needs of native speakers. This is only fair (see below).
As a said before -- being the lingua franca has advantages and disadvantages. Among the disadvantages is that English is no longer owned bu the English ("England for the English")
Think of who gets harmed most; A German speaker who knows English as a second language and who already has access to a German encyclopedia that follows proper German rules and conventions. Or an English speaker with an English language encyclopedia that follows a weird convention that replaces the place and person names they know with foreign words. Now the German speaker gets to have an encyclopedia in his native tongue that follows the rules of his language but the English speaker does not get to have such an encyclopedia. How is that fair?
I disagree, again, that the only reason for redirects is a "hack". As for "reflecting a bias" -- Im not sure this is NPOV. IS the area of language forever to be an issue where the prime directive of NPOV is undermined?
What? How is it at all neutral to replace terms known by the majority of English speakers with terms that are only known by a few? I would venture to guess that there is no English speaker alive who knows all 3,000 or so languages in the world. Sure, they would be perfectly at home with your "convention" but the rest of us won't.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)