Oh, good, I like that.  Let's change all the rules intermittantly, thus requiring someone to go back to all of the articles that were created under the old rules and have to change all of them.  That makes a lot of sense.

What people of baby Lir's ilk keep trying to ignore is that the rules are being applied to an English-language encyclopedia.  We are writing articles about things as they are in the English language, not as (some of us) wish they were.  Let's call things by what people who speak English expect to find

Zoe

 Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:

Magnus Manske wrote:

> Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
>> we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their
>> Russian name-not according to the English name.
>
> But the English wikipedia has agreed on using English names. For the
> title of the article, that is. The "native" name can be prominently
> mentioned in the opening paragraph.

I've only been on Wikipedia since February, but these "rules" were in
place before I got here. Nevertheless I share the concerns which Oliver
and Bridget have raised, but I've not had the energy for a lonely fight
against the forces of anglocentrism. I'll save my comments about this
particular rule for another posting; this one is about the rule making
procedures, with that rule being only one example.

People become comfortable with their rules, even wrong rules. The fact
is that it is likely that a majority of today's Wikipedians were not
around when these rules were established. If today's Wikipedian
perceives that he can have no influence on rules that were established
before he came on board, he will soon develop the impression that there
is a class structure based on seniority.

One highly respected Wikipedian replied to my suggestion of giving
letter codes to each article with a comment to the effect that with
nearly 100,000 articles in our encyclopedia it was too big to effect
those changes. A similar argument can be made about "correct" names; we
have so many articles that changing a rule is impossible. It doesn't
matter if the old rule was seriously flawed, or the new rule would
provide a useful tool for coping with an ever larger corpus of knowledge.

A broadly applicable new or revised rule must deal with transitional
compatibility problems. That is easy to understand. Colour television
was an obvious technical improvement over the old black-and-white
system, but its introduction had to take into account the fact that
there were a lot of black-and-white TVs out there, and that people could
not be expected to throw out their old sets just because they had
suddenly become obsolete.

My conclusion: most of our "rules" should be subject to periodic
review. If an old rule, including a well established rule, can be
improved or no longer seves its original purpose, or fails to cope with
newer needs it should be changed. Of course, in making changes,
compatibility issues must be considered.

Eclecticology


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