Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I have to say that the WikiProject Go would dearly like to override the policy on Japanese names, because the name order used in 40 years or more of go literature in English has used Japanese name order.
So... let them? Will the servers collapse if OH MY GOODNESS NOT EVERYTHING IS THE SAME?!!!
Names of people tend to be somewhat trickier, though, in that there's usually more than one interest group involved. The canonical example of this is probably diacritics in the names of ice hockey players: The hockey wikiproject insists (or did, last time I looked) that the names be spelled without diacritics, since that's the most common way they're spelled in sports media -- and the national wikiprojects insist they be spelled with them, since that's the most common way they're spelled everywhere else, especially in the countries the players come from.
The discussion, whenever it comes up, then gets sidetracked into issues of usability (how hard is it to type those characters?), server load (does it matter if most links come via redirects?), hit counting (which version, for any given name, really _is_ the most common?), consistency (should we pick the most common form for each player separately, for each country/language, for each specific sport, for all sportspeople in general, or what? what about people who are both hockey players and local politicians?), language politics (how to define the "most common English name"? does usage by people speaking English as a second language count? does it matter what some other-language Wikipedia does?), prescriptiveness vs. descriptiveness (should we use the "correct" name for a topic even if an "incorrect" one is more common? what is "correct", and how, if at all, does it relate to "official"?), turf wars (where should the discussion be conducted? who should be involved? does alerting your wikiproject count as astroturfing? what about alerting your local Wikipedia?) and general wikilawyering (what does the current version of the naming guidelines say? what did it say last month? do the topical subguidelines override the main guideline? does existing practice override guidelines? does the fact that this sentence seems to missing a word have any effect?)
At some point I was tempted to suggest a JavaScript hack that would make the diacritics blink on and off.