One small problem here. What if there are two discrete entries (I'm struggling for an example here), one spelling of which has no diacritics and an equivalent spelling of the "same" word (yet with a diacritic) and a wholly different meaning?
----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Mayer" maveric149@yahoo.com To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 2:15 AM Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Proposed addition to wikipedia: Naming conventions
On Wednesday 19 June 2002 12:01 pm, Lee wrote:
If a name has diacritics, for instance [[Jose Ramos-Horta|José Ramos-Horta]], avoid the diacritics when naming an article. If a link has a diacritic, what page it links to depends on the character set the browser is set to. A UTF-8 browser goes to what looks to a Latin-1 browser as "Jos&itrema;&iques;&1/2; Ramos- Horta", whereas a Latin-1 browser goes to an article whose title has an invalid UTF-8 character.
I think our general consensus is that there should be an article titled without diacritics, or otherwise Anglicized ("Goedel", for example), and that this article should be a redirect to an article with the real title, diacritics and all.
This would work in a perfect world in which the person making the diacriticaly named article also made an ASCII redirect it, Lee. But unfortunately this often isn't the case. Even worse is the fact that most netcitizens don't know how to use their keyboard to make diacritics -- meaning most people searching Google won't use them and that linking directly to these articles is unnecessarily difficult.
However, I proposed a similar anti-diacritics query on [[talk:naming conventions]] some time ago but soon began to realize that this is a technical issue that can be solved by the wikiware gurus. All that is needed is for the software to treat the diacritic form and the ASCII equivalent the same. For example; é and e could be treated as the same character for searches and for linking (the Google issue might pose a problem though....). That way when somebody searches for [[José Ramos-Horta]] by entering in Jose Ramos-Horta in the wikipedia search engine they won't come up empty handed if nobody made an ASCII redirect to the diacritic name.
Is this possible? Desirable? Or should we go with the original anti-diacritics naming convention suggestion?
maveric149 [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l