On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Oliver Pereira wrote:
Hello,
I've just joined this list (two weeks after discovering the Wikipedia), and I thought I'd leap into this argument straight away with a controversial view, just as my way of saying hello. :)
As far as I can tell, traditional paper-based encyclopaedias had articles under common names simply so that people could find them easily. If every common name just said "see [less common name]", the readers would become annoyed, and reject the encyclopaedia.
With the Wikipedia's automatic redirection scheme, this constraint has disappeared. Anyone can look up any article in the Wikipedia under any name they want, and be redirected to the article in the blink of an eye. (Assuming the redirects have all been put in, of course.) So the traditional reason for putting everything under its most common name has disappeared.
It seems to me that experts on a topic often want the title of the article to be "correct" - whether this means having a book's full and unabbreviated title, a person's full name in their original language, or whatever. Whereas people with less knowledge just want to be able to find it or link to it using the name they know best.
With the redirection scheme in place, can't we have our cake and eat it? The experts can put the "correct" name as the title, and make redirection pages for all the different abbreviations, translations, colloquial variations, and so on. (They would also put these abbreviations, translations, colloquial variations in the introductory paragraph of the article itself, for reference purposes.) Everyone else can then freely use the common names and let the redirection direct them to the "correct" name.
Wouldn't that please everybody?
No, because the point of contention is that people disagree on what is the "correct" name.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)