Wikipedia has an article whose name is a mistake, but people claim that the article must be named that anyway because our rules say that we must use the most widely used English name, and the mistake is used more frequently than the correct name. (This happened because the mistake was made by a big English-language publisher, so a lot of people picked it up.)
The rule in question is rule 8 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(Japan-related_articl...
If you look at it, it seems meant for cases where the English name is a loanword or was written in a strange way on purpose, not for mistakes. I think it's ludicrous to interpret it to mean that if a mistake is used 51% of the time, Wikipedia must perpetuate it.
This has been spearheaded by a single user, who has pushed for the name since 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:InuYasha#Naming_Conventions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tetsusaiga#Tetsusaiga_vs._Tessaiga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_for_Japan-relate... (2004)
Is there anything whatsoever I can do about this?
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 6:12 AM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
If you look at it, it seems meant for cases where the English name is a loanword or was written in a strange way on purpose, not for mistakes.
So, apart from you, who says it's a mistake?
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 9:25 AM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, Stephen Bain wrote:
If you look at it, it seems meant for cases where the English name is a loanword or was written in a strange way on purpose, not for mistakes.
So, apart from you, who says it's a mistake?
Didn't we just cover this already?
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I'm not clear on it either. If there really is a big mistake, surely some source has published -something- regarding that mistake in a slightly more reliable venue than WikiEN-l. Controversial or disputed changes do need a source beyond "I said so", even if you have good reason to say so. If sources got it wrong, try to get someone to study and publish information on that in a reliable source. Wikipedia is not a first publisher and not a first corrector.
2008/7/18 Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net:
Wikipedia has an article whose name is a mistake, but people claim that the article must be named that anyway because our rules say that we must use the most widely used English name, and the mistake is used more frequently than the correct name. (This happened because the mistake was made by a big English-language publisher, so a lot of people picked it up.)
On the face of it, that's an excellent reason to keep the article right where it is.
That's why the article on the capital of Ukraine is at [[Kiev]] rather than [[Kyuv]]. The Ukraine government even states "Kyuv" is its official name in English, but people who speak English keep overwhelmingly using "Kiev."
If you want to move it, you need some good sources that actually use the name you advocate. Are there any?
- d.
2008/7/19 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
That's why the article on the capital of Ukraine is at [[Kiev]] rather than [[Kyuv]]. The Ukraine government even states "Kyuv" is its official name in English, but people who speak English keep overwhelmingly using "Kiev."
Kyiv, not Kyuv.
- d.
On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, David Gerard wrote:
That's why the article on the capital of Ukraine is at [[Kiev]] rather than [[Kyuv]]. The Ukraine government even states "Kyuv" is its official name in English, but people who speak English keep overwhelmingly using "Kiev."
That example doesn't support your idea. From our article:
"Kiev is also based on the old Ukrainian language spelling of the city name and was used by Ukrainians and their ancestors from the time of Kievan Rus until only about the last century."
An obsolete spelling is not a mistake.
On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, Ken Arromdee wrote:
"Kiev is also based on the old Ukrainian language spelling of the city name and was used by Ukrainians and their ancestors from the time of Kievan Rus until only about the last century."
An obsolete spelling is not a mistake.
I might also add that 1) Kiev, as a city name, appears in a lot of reference works. There are around 700 times as many Google hits for Kiev as for Tetsusaiga. In other words, having a Kiev article may reflect usage, but is much less likely to *influence* usage. 2) The ratio of Kiev to Kyiv is much more lopsided than the ratio of Tetsusaiga to Tessaiga. For Kiev, it's 9.4 to 1. For Tetsusaiga, it's 1.4 to 1. The rule has to be stretched a lot less when the bad name only numbers the correct one by 1.4 to 1 anyway.
On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, David Gerard wrote:
If you want to move it, you need some good sources that actually use the name you advocate. Are there any?
It's a popular culture article. Our rules for sourcing are completely broken for popular culture articles. Moreover, most written material in English comes from the company that mistranslated the name.
It's not hard to find sources that do use the right name, though because it's a popular culture article it's just about impossible to find anything that counts as a source by Wikipedia standards:
Wikipedia itself described the origin of the name until the person who changed the name also took it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tetsusaiga&diff=225145533&...
The name 'Tetsusaiga' is a mistranslation from the original Japanese name for the sword. InuYasha's sword is actually known as the 'Tessaiga' in Japanese but due to an error when translating the series from Japanese to English, it became the Tetsusaiga. The smaller version of the hiragana character "tsu" () was mistaken for the larger version of the hiragana character "tsu" (). So, instead of doubling the consonant "s" in the name, a "tsu" was inserted into the name, thus giving us 'Tetsusaiga'. By the time Viz discovered the error, it was decided that it was too late to change the name back to the original.
http://www.funtrivia.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=467842&... "Well, like I said, I directly consulted with someone able to read kana, and they as I quoted above, told me that the correct spelling is "Tessaiga", he even had another double-check this, and that person who double-checked his translation was Japanese born, living in Japan, so I would think it is safe to say they are right."
On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
By the time Viz discovered the error, it was decided that it was too late to change the name back to the original.
1) If you have a source for that paragraph, it would be a great addition to the body text of the article.
2) Even if that is the case, it doesn't change the fact that the "mistaken" version is the one that is actually used in English. Indeed, if the publisher chose not to correct their "mistake" after discovering it, that suggests that the "mistaken" version is the title we should use.
On Sun, 20 Jul 2008, Stephen Bain wrote:
- If you have a source for that paragraph, it would be a great
addition to the body text of the article.
You read the paragraph, but you obviously didn't read the message. As I said, it's a popular culture source, and our sourcing rules, being academically biased, make it unreasonably hard to source most of those. I wasn't claiming that that was a source by Wikipedia standards, only by real world standards.
Of course, there is a source that's good by Wikipedia standards: we've long accepted that a source for information about a work is the work itself. Furthermore, we've accepted that a foreign language source is a source, and the translation of it doesn't need to be separately sourced. Therefore, I can look at the original Japanese version of Inuyasha and read the name off, and that's a legitimate source. The statement about Viz's intentions would have to be left out, but the statement that the sword's name isn't spelled that way in Japanese needs no more sources than that.
You're also ignoring that taking out that paragraph doesn't affect the issue of the article's title. Titles, and in general decisions made about an article, don't need sources. The classic example is a Google test; we can use one to decide how to name an article (though it's not very wise here!), what to include, and how much weight to give sections--yet a Google test is, as a source, completely unacceptable.
Finally, you're ignoring the common sense issue. All this is irrelevant; giving an article a name that's a mistake, when the mistake and the correct name are both well known and Wikipedia is likely to influence real life usage, is stupid.