Lars Aronsson wrote:
I think the problem is that Lir is young and has more energy to question authority, than patience to listen before he speaks. This makes it hard for him to engage in a dialogue. He questions his peers, with whom he should cooperate, instead of knowing his enemies and where he should direct his energy. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I think his homepage indicated he was 21. I'm 36. I have no idea how old or young or energetic or lazy everybody else is. I'm lazy enough, not to bother very much in all the detail.
The issue of using diacritical marks is not about Lir. Lir may have been the one to raise the matter, but that does not alter the objective question of diacriticals. At 59 I'm much lazier than a 36-year old kid. I know that people with a poor credibility occasionally make worth while contributions, and that highly respected people are not immune from stupidity.
If anything, the debate so far has shown that we are far from unanimous in our opinions about how non-English names should be treated. A rule that "the English Wikipedia is in English" seems trivial at first glance. It works well as long as we stick to common nouns and concepts of English language origin. There's a whole non-English speaking world out there with many interesting ideas that are worth incorporating into Wikipedia. A dictionary is about words; an encyclopedia is about ideas, and, in the absence of direct neural interfaces, an encyclopedia needs the words to communicate its ideas. The diacritics of another language enhance communication, and often are the distinguishing feature between dissimilar words. The poetics of another language can suffer badly in translation, yet such a small concession as allowing foreign words to be fully accented is worth doing if it enhances the understanding of the other culture. Yes, I know that Spanish considers "n" and "ñ" to be separate letters which follow each other in alphabetical order, and that Swedish considers "a" and "å" to be separate letters with the latter put in a group of special letters at the end of the alphabet. I would never propose that we adopt the hodge-podge of aphabetical orders from other languages. Algorithms can be established to link these letters to their unaccented counterparts. The French certainly have no trouble treating "e", "è", "é" and "ê" as the same letter for alphabetical purposes, and that's just fine for English. It also allows for users who just don't know what the correct accent is in a given circumstance including native speakers. What I really oppose is having English as the foundation for a modern Tower of Babel.
But I know that after Lir we will still have the same problem with the next of the same kind. So what is our conclusion, and what tools will we have prepared for the next time this happens?
Indeed we will! I very strongly agree that we should have objective procedures for dealing with these. Those procedures should help us not only to deal with "guilty" parties, but also safeguard users from being overwhelmed by the mob instinct..
Eclecticology