From: Delirium delirium@rufus.d2g.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 14:48:09 -0700
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 unencylopædic 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, encyclopædic NPOV manner.
Mark wrote:
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?
:-) If you are going to discuss titles, honorifics, styles, etc, do try to know what they are!
Sir is not the same as All-Holiness. One is a manner of address, one is when inherited or awarded as part of one's name. 'Blessed' is not the same as 'The Honourable'. They are two fundamentally different things. 'The Honourable' is not part of a name, but a mode of address, the diplomats and most presidents are 'His/Her Excellency', monarchs are 'His/Her Majesty', popes/Dalai lamas are 'His Holiness. 'Blessed' becomes in effect part of the name of a beatified person and over time the standard reference when referring to them. They really are fundamentally different concepts, which is why wikipedia has clear agreed rules for how one uses styles, titles, courtesy titles, honours, etc. They are fundamentally different things, a fact your comments here and elsewhere suggests you have completely failed to grasp.
To give a practical example, courtesy titles are often so identified with a holder that they are almost impossible to recognise without them. So anyone who has ever studied British or Irish history knows immediately that ''Lord John Russell'' is the British Prime Minister in the 1840s. Nobody would have a clue who the article was about if it was referred to as ''John Russell'', because no-one but his mother ever called him that. But Bob Geldof, Ronald Reagan and Ted Health, who were awarded knighthoods, are recognisable without using 'Sir'. So there is no question of including the 'sir' in the article name. This was all discussed in intense detail and a structure for when to use what, and when not to use what, agreed and followed by wikipedia ever since.
JT
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