>Mav: But the English word for the city is Prague, not Praha. If you present an
average English speaker with the word "Praha" they are not going to know what
that is.

Well, you might consider the notion that people come to an encyclopedia to learn something. And this ignores the fact that a search for Prague will lead to Praha.

>But present the same English speaker with "Prague" and they will
recognize it. Same for Deutschland vs Germany. Why should we needlessly
confuse our readers and make them feel stupid for not knowing the "right"
word for Prauge or Germany?

Only people who are vain about what they know, feel disturbed by what they dont. An Encyclopedia is here to present information - not to simply agree with what people already know.

>They will probably take one look at the foreign
>title and leave thinking they landed in the wrong place (if not the wrong
>language).

Not if they see its redirected from "Prague" below - and boy, what a low opinion of people you must have to think they would be so... confused. Is humanity a 'glass half full' or 'half empty?'

>It is counter to our purpose of being understandable by the largest number of English
>speakers and especially native English speakers (when writing in English, of
>course).

>That will only lead to having misdirected links as English speakers
>can't remember the spelling of a foreign word. We already had a major fight
>with Lir over Cristóbal Colón vs Christopher Columbus - please don't open up
>old wounds. You have already pissed a bunch of people off by having a nick in
>non-English characters because they couldn't read or pronounce it.

Once again - referring to how confused people are. Well, Lir was right. The only people who disagree with that were people stuck in convention. Its certainly will sound like its from Neptune when it defies the typical conventions - but this requires people to be somewhat unconventional. You and I agree on a number of things - among them should be the principle that simply "not pissing people off" - deserves no merits on its own.

>All that matters is what the majority of English speakers recognize as the
>title and for us to make modifications and compromises where needed to
>overcome ambiguities. Oh, and there is no such thing as a "real name" for
>anything - words play a nominative role and different words are used in
>different languages to mean the same things. This is such an elementary fact
>that I'm embarrassed to have to mention it to you.

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.)

If you watched John Stossel's piece last night - he showed a neighborhood in Queens destroyed by people bent on ridding foreign language signs from the streets - under the guise of clutter - and other civil codes. The city went along with it - because such laws were on the books - (why argue with the law after awl?) But the city also was fining people three or four digits for just having the awnings there to begin with. The smirks on the faces of the perpetrators - also invoking "America" - and "this is how we do it in America" - was disgusting beyond description. Its a similar attitude.

As for their not being "real names for things" - I suppose if we decided to change the USA to "MeiGuo" or "Estados Unidentes" you would have to face your own statement in reverse. In that case - I would be in favor of calling it the "United States of America" - cause thats its name. The reason why there are "proper" names for things tends to be relative to language. Now - you may want to look like a colonialist and go argue with somebody Chinese over the proper article title for "Yangtze" - see where it gets you.

>Sometimes this means we use words that are very close to or even the same as
>the words used in the country of origin of the thing but other times it means
>we use an Anglicization (which is the process modifying foreign words to make
>it easier for English speakers to use and pronounce them). All that matters
>is what is known and recognized by most English speakers at all familiar with
>the subject (and making sure there are no significant naming conflicts and
>also making sure we aren't just making up Anglicizations).

Well your toughest argument by far is based on a limitation of the En wikipedia to en "native English speakers" - again. 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")

|This aids in linking for writers and the ability of readers to find what they
|are looking for. That's all. Redirects can and should be used for less common
|forms of the term so that people looking for those forms can find the
|articles too. But leave the terms that are most widely known and used by
|English speakers at the head of their articles - not some form of the name
|that is seldom used by English speakers (especially native ones).

Mav's argument here rests entirely upon his assumption of a unique reason for redirects - and then he somewhat concedes the point with the word "should." Fine! Your opinion - that redirects "should" be limited to one use is noted. Lets see what other people think, shall we?

|And article titles should reflect a strong bias toward what English speakers
|are going to most often write in a sentence when referring to the subject
|(with modifications based on ambiguities). That whole point of doing this is
|to maximize the number of direct links to a title - redirects are a hack used
|for less common terms.

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?