Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
Get this: Wikipedia is no less respectable for using the French name than for using the English one. If its agreed code of rules says to follow one set of criteria, and hundreds of thousands of articles are written following it, and some choose to abandon the agreed standards and 'do their own thing' different to the rest of the pages, then Wikipedia's credibility as a sourcebook will plummet. The language is irrelevant. The only thing relevant is whether the terminology used is what readers would use. It has been unambiguously proven that in that one case the French name is rarely used except in one continent, and for hundreds of millions of readers is never used and unknown. Showing contempt for them by saying 'we're going to use the site to push one name because the government tells us to, irrespective of your needs' does not help WP's credibility. And as WP gets bigger and more famous, its need for credibility is central. If its credibility suffers through lack of professionalism then WP will soon find that its media coverage will turn from positive and negative, and everyone's hard work in trying to make a real as opposed to joke encylopædia will have been in vain.
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