On 26 Jul 2006 at 15:31, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
mboverload wrote:
I'm not sure why you're mentioning it, but I recently changed every mention of Pokemon to Pok?mon.
[snip]
A few years ago there was a big debate over whether names should include accents, and I believe that was settled back then. This doesn't meant that we don't have a few retro-luddites who would still believe that the results should have been different.
I guess whoever programmed the system that produces and distributes the digest form of this list is among those "luddites", since the digest is done in strict US-ASCII, and the accented letter above shows up as a question mark.
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On 26 Jul 2006 at 15:31, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
mboverload wrote:
I'm not sure why you're mentioning it, but I recently changed every mention of Pokemon to Pok?mon.
[snip]
A few years ago there was a big debate over whether names should include accents, and I believe that was settled back then. This doesn't meant that we don't have a few retro-luddites who would still believe that the results should have been different.
I guess whoever programmed the system that produces and distributes the digest form of this list is among those "luddites", since the digest is done in strict US-ASCII, and the accented letter above shows up as a question mark.
Why, praytell, are you using digests???
On 7/28/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
I guess whoever programmed the system that produces and distributes the digest form of this list is among those "luddites", since the digest is done in strict US-ASCII, and the accented letter above shows up as a question mark.
Why, praytell, are you using digests???
Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.
That being said, the current rehash of the diacritic vs. non-diacritic article titles is piping back up on [[WP:HOCKEY]].
I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey players.
-Ras
On 7/28/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey players.
Because that guideline doesn't have 100% consensus, especially for peoples' names, and secondarily for placenames. You might not like that fact, but we wouldn't have constant arguments about the topic were the consensus solid.
This is made more complex by the fact that 'use English' is in itself a complex issue. Some - many - English-language publications use diacritics. It's also somewhat debatable whether 'use English' means 'always transliterate into diacriticless spellings'.
-Matt
On 29/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey players.
Although many letters with diacritics *look* like English letters, they are not the same. "Antonín Dvořák" can't simply be changed into "Antonin Dvorak" because this would be changing the letters of the word, so changing the spelling of the word. In this name, changing "ř" would be particularly problematic as the letter is quite distinct from "r" in several ways (most importantly, pronounciation).
On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey players.
Although many letters with diacritics *look* like English letters, they are not the same. "Antonín Dvořák" can't simply be changed into "Antonin Dvorak" because this would be changing the letters of the word, so changing the spelling of the word. In this name, changing "ř" would be particularly problematic as the letter is quite distinct from "r" in several ways (most importantly, pronounciation).
I fully understand that. The most common way you see Dvořák's name printed in English is "Dvořák," fully and diacritically correct.
That said, if the full policy is that the most commonly recognized English name for the person or thing addressed in the article is where the article should reside, then [[Jaromir Jagr]] is right where it belongs.
There are people who are quite unhappy about it right now, and I really don't understand why, not because I don't understand the concept of diacritics, pronunciation differences et al, but because as a common courtesy, we as English speakers don't go barging over to cs-wiki demanding that they change http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolfov%C3%A1 to [[Virginia Woolfe]] because they have the capability to display E's.
We're not saying "change Dvořák," we're saying "respect policy."
-Ras
On 30/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
We're not saying "change Dvořák," we're saying "respect policy."
Because English Wikipedia is so international, and has so many English-as-a-second-language users, I think we should remain as international as possible. We should retain non-English spellings as extensively as possible.
On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
We're not saying "change Dvořák," we're saying "respect policy."
Because English Wikipedia is so international, and has so many English-as-a-second-language users, I think we should remain as international as possible. We should retain non-English spellings as extensively as possible.
So forget policy then, right?
On 30/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
So forget policy then, right?
Change policy.
On 7/30/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
So forget policy then, right?
Change policy.
Can you give us some examples of pages that currently follow policy, and how they would be named under a proposed change to policy?
steve
On 30/07/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Can you give us some examples of pages that currently follow policy, and how they would be named under a proposed change to policy?
I'll refer you to two discussions about the issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions/archive7#Usin... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_%28use_Englis...
Two good examples are historical. We should use "Hermann Göring" (not Goering) and "Napoléon" (not Napoleon).
On 7/30/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Two good examples are historical. We should use "Hermann Göring" (not Goering) and "Napoléon" (not Napoleon).
Hmm, I would agree that Göring is marginally preferable to Goering, but Napoleon is vastly preferable to Napoléon. In the latter case, it's a pronunciation thing: in English, we say "Napol-ee-on" not "Napol-ay-on". In the former, Goering just seems uneducated...
It's a really tricky question overall, and I often have trouble deciding which form I prefer. Particularly, on French topics, I have major leanings towards keeping the French name, but that's just because I'm biased. It often seems so much more precise to keep the real French term for something than some novel translation (can you imagine High Speed Train rather than TGV for instance?)
The other major point to bear in mind is that all of this should really only apply when there is a genuine established tradition of using the name in English. That is a very small minority of any foreign names...
Steve
On 7/31/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
The other major point to bear in mind is that all of this should really only apply when there is a genuine established tradition of using the name in English. That is a very small minority of any foreign names...
And in hockey, they're a significant minority. That's where this came in.
I'm not trying to throw the blanket of "Use English" over the entire wiki, I'm trying to keep the hockey articles by their most-identified English usage. That's all, no more, no less.
-Ras
On 7/29/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
We're not saying "change Dvořák," we're saying "respect policy."
While [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions]] is marked as policy, the page [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] is marked as guideline only.
In the end, whether the name on the article is recognisable is what's important, not whether or not it has diacritics - redirects can take care of that.
-Matt
G'day John,
I fully understand that. The most common way you see Dvořák's name printed in English is "Dvořák," fully and diacritically correct.
That said, if the full policy is that the most commonly recognized English name for the person or thing addressed in the article is where the article should reside, then [[Jaromir Jagr]] is right where it belongs.
<snip />
English is not --- any longer --- the twenty-six characters we learn about in school. "Café" is still "café", even if a couple of very silly people in Millwall insist on pronouncing it "kaiph"; I find it rather astonishing that there are people who would be very unhappy at the idea that our article wouldn't spell it "cafe". "Göring" is "Göring", "Schrödinger" is "Schrödinger", etc., etc.
There are words we know best in their Anglicised form, and there are words (and names) which we don't. I appreciate your approach --- the most commonly recognised name, in English --- although I hope *you* appreciate that English is not just a language spoken in parts of North America ... and the views of an English-speaking fellow in Poland are just as important as those of someone who once rang up and complained because his copy of /TV Guide/ included diacritic marks over the names of a football player.
Displaying an Anglicised word because that's how the word is best-known amongst English speakers is bonza. That doesn't mean we need to operate with a deliberate bias against those funny little foreign characters used by funny little foreigners.
We're not saying "change Dvořák," we're saying "respect policy."
Fuck policy. Policy is a stick to hit stupid process wonks with until they're willing to do the Right Thing. If policy currently prescribes the Right Thing, then don't say "respect policy" --- it's senseless when you could just say "do the Right Thing". If policy is *wrong*, then don't say "respect policy", because then you'll be doing the Wrong Thing.
(Well, policy is also useful when the identity of the Right Thing is ambiguous. My alternative proposal --- everyone does what Mark Gallagher says --- hasn't quite caught on the way I hoped it might, so following policy can be a good compromise. But we should follow policy for a good reason, *never* "just because it's policy".)
Cheers,
On 7/30/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
Displaying an Anglicised word because that's how the word is best-known amongst English speakers is bonza. That doesn't mean we need to operate with a deliberate bias against those funny little foreign characters used by funny little foreigners.
That's what I was trying to illustrate with the Dvořák/Dvorak example. It's not a bias against using "those funny little foreign characters." Like you said, it's how the word is best-known amongst English speakers. I certainly understand and respect that American isn't English; when we're writing hockey articles we go by the "first author's wishes" rule, and maintain the articles with whatever mode of spelling they decided to use, regardless of whether we use colour or color.
I also went into this fully aware of what would happen. After two previous attempts at moves like this, it's been a hailstorm of criticism and "omg respect foreign characters!!!11!!!1". Really, I should've known better than to get hip-deep in this shit again.
Like you said, policy is a stick to hit people with. There's been absolutely no consensus as to this issue. None.
In your own words, we should Do the Right Thing.
Instead, I'm leaving it alone again. Much like the arguments we had over whether Wayne Gretzky was "the best of all time" or "one of the best of all time" et al, ad nauseum, I'm exhausted of debating points with vocal minorities. I hate arguing over Stupid Shit, and this is the stupidest.
Though I'm partial to the "Everyone does what Mark says" routine. It's certainly better than "Everyone does what John says" as a decree, because I'm a heavy handed bastard.
-John
On 7/30/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
Like you said, policy is a stick to hit people with. There's been absolutely no consensus as to this issue. None.
Entirely the issue, I feel, and why there is de facto no fully functioning policy on this topic.
-Matt
On 7/30/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Like you said, policy is a stick to hit people with. There's been absolutely no consensus as to this issue. None.
Entirely the issue, I feel, and why there is de facto no fully functioning policy on this topic.
I'm finding more and more that despite having a Policy Stick to beat people with, many others are too afraid to hit them with it.
On 7/30/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm finding more and more that despite having a Policy Stick to beat people with, many others are too afraid to hit them with it.
Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. With the exception of core Wikipedia policies not subject to debate, you can't use policy to force things through without broad support.
The use of diacritical marks in page names for people, when the name is fully recognisable even by those not familiar with the diacritics, and where appropriate redirects exist, does not (IMO) have that broad support. It may have a majority, but I doubt even that when it comes to (english-language) Wikipedia contributors as a whole. Straw polls and the like just show how many people are rabid about the issue.
Certainly I think that neither extreme point of view has a majority, and that it's hard to even find a point-in-the-middle that could gain overwhelming support.
-Matt
On 7/31/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. With the exception of core Wikipedia policies not subject to debate, you can't use policy to force things through without broad support.
It's both: Policy prescribes that everyone must follow what consensus has agreed on.
The use of diacritical marks in page names for people, when the name is fully recognisable even by those not familiar with the diacritics, and where appropriate redirects exist, does not (IMO) have that broad support. It may have a majority, but I doubt even that when it comes to (english-language) Wikipedia contributors as a whole. Straw polls and the like just show how many people are rabid about the issue.
Certainly I think that neither extreme point of view has a majority, and that it's hard to even find a point-in-the-middle that could gain overwhelming support.
One of the weaknesses with the Wikipedia model that is becoming more apparent. There are just some issues where consensus can never be gained, so a consistent policy can never be achieved. Which is a pity: It means our encyclopaedia will never have any kind of broad consistency, and will instead have different articles following different rules which reflect the local consensuses that have been achieved.
Steve
I personally think that the reasonable middle ground would be that genuine accents and other real diacritical marks should be redirects to the accentless form, but where it is a question of what looks like an umlaut or circumflex or the like, actually being a completely separate letter than the letter which lacks that graphical feature, the misspelling used by ignorant English publications should be the redirect. I really think such cases qualify as a misspelling, and not a translitteration. But I don't expect to convince anyone. The question in general should not excite great discord, as long as there are redirects.
On 7/30/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
That's what I was trying to illustrate with the Dvořák/Dvorak example. It's not a bias against using "those funny little foreign characters." Like you said, it's how the word is best-known amongst English speakers. I certainly understand and respect that American isn't
I missed the debate, but it seems obvious that the accents in (Antonin) Dvorak should be retained: any CD or score of music by Dvorak would have the accents written. Any discussion of Dvorak would have them. And so should we.
If we were discussing a different Dvorak (perhaps the one after whom the keyboard layout I'm using is named), then different considerations would apply. I don't think the Dvorak layout is ever called the Dvořák layout for instance, nor is the writer John Dvorak ever called John Dvořák.
Blanket rules like "Use English" don't help at all.
Steve
John Lyden wrote:
Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.
That being said, the current rehash of the diacritic vs. non-diacritic article titles is piping back up on [[WP:HOCKEY]].
I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey players.
I wasn't aware that the problem had arisen in that context. Maybe it's because these players normally write their names with an accent.
Ec
John Lyden wrote:
Why, praytell, are you using digests???
Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.
Am I really the only person in the whole world that uses the newsgroups?... I keep seeing this false dilemma fallacy, and nobody ever responds to it to set it straight.
Digests are the absolutely dumbest and worst imaginable way to solve the "volumes of mail" problem.
Timwi
On 8/2/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Am I really the only person in the whole world that uses the newsgroups?... I keep seeing this false dilemma fallacy, and nobody ever responds to it to set it straight.
Out of my sample space of you and me, yes, you are definitely the only person not using the normal mail option to communicate with this list.
I didn't even know there was a newsgroup bridge :)
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/2/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Am I really the only person in the whole world that uses the newsgroups?... I keep seeing this false dilemma fallacy, and nobody ever responds to it to set it straight.
Out of my sample space of you and me, yes, you are definitely the only person not using the normal mail option to communicate with this list.
Out of my sample space of you and me, you are definitely the only person who doesn't use the newsgroups, and to boot, you didn't even know one existed. :-)
If you're interested: http://gmane.org/
This mailing list is in the newsgroup gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english (the bizarre hierarchy is probably historical).
Timwi
On 8/2/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
This mailing list is in the newsgroup gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english (the bizarre hierarchy is probably historical).
Interesting. Must have a look.
Not that I've ever liked usenet - typically low S/N ratio, and not knowing when your message will propagate to certain readers.
Steve
On 8/2/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/2/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
This mailing list is in the newsgroup gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english (the bizarre hierarchy is probably historical).
Interesting. Must have a look.
Not that I've ever liked usenet - typically low S/N ratio, and not knowing when your message will propagate to certain readers.
[[Gmane]] isn't [[Usenet]]. It's a Usenet-like interface to a whole bunch of mailing lists.
On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 02:38:58PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
John Lyden wrote:
Why, praytell, are you using digests???
Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.
Am I really the only person in the whole world that uses the newsgroups?... I keep seeing this false dilemma fallacy, and nobody ever responds to it to set it straight.
Digests are the absolutely dumbest and worst imaginable way to solve the "volumes of mail" problem.
I do not agree, but you have to use the digest sensibly. I download them using fetchmail with pop3. I read mail with mutt. When I see a digest, I hit control S and the digest message is piped through a script called metamutt that opens a separate mutt temporay folder with all the messages split out from the digest. I can then skip through these, exit back the main folder and delete the digest. If I want to keep a message I just save it from the temp folder to a main folder. Download is easier and reading them is clearer. I almost always subscribe to lists via the digest mode. The only negatives is the delay in getting messages and a bug that means I have to save a message to a main folder before replying.
Brian
Timwi
Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 02:38:58PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
John Lyden wrote:
Why, praytell, are you using digests???
Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.
Am I really the only person in the whole world that uses the newsgroups?... I keep seeing this false dilemma fallacy, and nobody ever responds to it to set it straight.
Digests are the absolutely dumbest and worst imaginable way to solve the "volumes of mail" problem.
I do not agree, but you have to use the digest sensibly. I download them using fetchmail with pop3. I read mail with mutt. When I see a digest, I hit control S and the digest message is piped through a script called metamutt that opens a separate mutt temporay folder with all the messages split out from the digest.
I don't see how that is any different from simply filtering the messages into a folder directly. It is strictly equivalent except that it doesn't incur the delay that the digest does, therefore it's strictly better :)
Timwi
On 02/08/06, Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au wrote:
I do not agree, but you have to use the digest sensibly. I download them using fetchmail with pop3. I read mail with mutt. When I see a digest, I hit control S and the digest message is piped through a script called metamutt that opens a separate mutt temporay folder with all the messages split out from the digest. I can then skip through these, exit back the main folder and delete the digest. If I want to keep a message I just save it from the temp folder to a main folder. Download is easier and reading them is clearer. I almost always subscribe to lists via the digest mode. The only negatives is the delay in getting messages and a bug that means I have to save a message to a main folder before replying.
Brian
I find that the Gmail interface, and the way it works, is great for mailing lists. Conversations are sensibly stacked making things very easy to read. Labels are easily added to conversations and archiving gets everything out of the way.
Plus, you can search the whole collection.
On 8/3/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
I find that the Gmail interface, and the way it works, is great for mailing lists. Conversations are sensibly stacked making things very easy to read. Labels are easily added to conversations and archiving gets everything out of the way.
Plus, you can search the whole collection.
The worst thing is you can only see 20 messages at a time when searching. Trying to perform some operation on every message satisfying some criteria is a pain in the arse.
I use the Gmail interface exclusively, and general, yeah it works well (particularly like its way of detecting "quoted text"), but I find that once messages have scrolled out of the active view they're very difficult to find again. Unlike a normal mail program, where scrolling down is trivial.
YMMV.
Steve
Well Wikipedia is in Unicode...so yeah.
On 7/27/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 26 Jul 2006 at 15:31, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
mboverload wrote:
I'm not sure why you're mentioning it, but I recently changed every
mention
of Pokemon to Pok?mon.
[snip]
A few years ago there was a big debate over whether names should include accents, and I believe that was settled back then. This doesn't meant that we don't have a few retro-luddites who would still believe that the results should have been different.
I guess whoever programmed the system that produces and distributes the digest form of this list is among those "luddites", since the digest is done in strict US-ASCII, and the accented letter above shows up as a question mark.
-- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
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