On 14/11/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
Absolutely not. It is a fact that an article is being kept in a location against the explicit rules in the MoS but a vote of users of one particular language, many of whom seem intent on putting their defence of that language above Wikipedia's own rules.
...wait a second. Unless I misread that talk page, the majority of the voters on both sides are Anglophone - I recognise many of the names. I fail to see how this is "a vote of users of one particular language ... intent on their defence of that language". Unless that language is English, of course.
Unless I've become part of the grand Francophone conspiracy, along with a good number of native English speakers I recognise voting on there, it's hard to read this sort of complaint as anything but a bad-faith accusation and an attempt to circumvent a process to obtain consensus *which you yourself initiated*. If you will resort to voting, please have the common decency not to try and undermine it when you dislike what the community seems to be saying.
As Sam says below, this is an issue of interpretation of a clear and sensible rule which is, in this case, ambiguous. We had the same over Gdansk/Danzig, over Gasoline/Petrol, over Alumin(i)um, a score of other pages. I have no doubt that a sizable proportion of people on both sides of those disputes knew for a fact that they were right about their preferred usage being vastly more common, and quoted specific searches to prove it.
(History, of course, records that at least half of them must have been wrong.)
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk