From: Delirium <delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)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
_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail