James Duffy wrote:
As we have an agreed naming convention, applied
to thousands of
articles, by a range of people from professional editors like Zoe and
bookworms like Deb to experts on constitutional history like John
Kenney, any unilateral attempt to abandon what has been agreed
because Mark has a POV he wishes to push, would be a gross abuse of
wiki and grossly insulting to the many people who solved what had
been a glaring problem. Mark may not like titles, but the fact that
they exist. Covering them accurately and factually is NPOV. Trying to
push an agenda that says 'I don't like them, therefore I will remove
them', is pushing a POV, is unencylopic and grossly disrespectiful to
the large numbers of people who debated the issue, made observations
and have spent a year implementing the agreed wikipedia policy in a
professional, encyclopic NPOV manner.
I disagree strongly, and your attempt to leverage credentials is both
a logical fallacy (look up "appeal to authority", or the equivalent
Latin phrase if you prefer) and grossly un-wiki.
The issue is that Wikipedia is endorsing certain titles, and not
endorsing others, which is inconsistent and POV. When we use Sir,
Blessed, and so on, and refuse to use His All-Holiness, His
Excellency, and The Honorable, this is a POV judgment, and
unacceptable in a professional encyclopedia.
If you do wish to use some honorifics, I would like to see some
conventions adopted indicating which we should use, and which we
should not. Why should the article on [[Mother Theresa]] start off
"Blessed Mother Theresa", while the article on [[Clarence Thomas]]
does not start off "The Honorable Clarence Thomas"? Is there a
principle behind this decision?
You're talking about two different issues. James is talking about
article titles. Delirium is talking about personal titles at the
beginning of the text IN an article. It makes it easier to know what we
disagree about when when we agree to disagree about the same thing. :-)
POV is unencyclopic when it pokes out one's only good eye. ;-) Sorry
James, but I can't resist the temptation of a good typo.!
Ec