Well, I went to that page, intending to do my Wikic duty and vote, and have given up. I consider myself a fairly bright guy, but I cannot make head nor tail out of the voting methodology in use there. I can't even figure out how to cast a vote, to say nothing of figuring out how the "authorities" are going to determine a winner.

-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of mail Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 15:01 To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] election

it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to call notable u.s. citizens. the top two choices are "people from the united states" or "americans"

[[Talk:List of United States people]]

mail wrote:

it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to call notable u.s. citizens. the top two choices are "people from the united states" or "americans"

[[Talk:List of United States people]]

Well, we don't really vote on such things, we seek for consensus.

The poll looks sort of fun, though, so I recommend people play with it. Like someone else who wrote, I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do to 'vote', though.

I, myself, was swayed by the arguments on the page. The real question is: What do speakers of English think when they hear "American"? Well, we know what Americans think, we think it means us. :-)

But if the following appeared in a British or Australian or other English-language newspaper, anywhere in the world, would people be confused? "The Americans are preparing for war with Iraq by sending troops to the Middle East." Would anyone be confused about that? Would anyone be surprised to read it?

I think, no. Here's an example of a self-described "americano from the Latino South" writing in a UK newspaper: http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,788149,00.html

Throughout, he refers to the U.S as America.

In English, then, referring to "Americans" is unambiguous in most contexts, is natural, and inoffensive.

--Jimbo