Well, no, I disagree that "*everyone* agrees" the names are incorrect.  In your example of Confucius, should we use the old-style Chinese transliteration or the new version?  Should we not transliterate at all but force those who only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only being able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?  An encyclopedia has to be usable.  If a person ONLY knows Confucius by that name, what purpose does it serve to force them not to be able to find his name because we, in our elititst "we know best and you're only idiots who can't be bothered to learn to speak Chinese" decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?

Zoe

 Oliver Pereira <omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

Oliver Pereira wrote:

> > 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?

Brion Vibber replied:

> No, because the point of contention is that people disagree on what is the
> "correct" name.

No, the point of contention is that the current policy is designed to
perpetuate names which *everyone* agrees are incorrect.

I gave some examples of what I meant by "correct" in my message:
unabbreviated book titles, and original names of people. For the purposes
of this discussion, let's look at one fairly straightforward example:
Confucius. *Everyone* agrees that he was never called that in his
lifteime, and yet that is the version used in the Wikipedia, because it is
the name most commonly used by English-speaking people.

A lot of garbled anglicisations and abbreviations came about because
people didn't have the education (or linguistic skills, or patience, or
whatever else) to use the original names. An encyclopaedia is supposed to
be an educational tool. I see no reason why the Wikipedia should
perpetuate garbled versions of names if it can educate people as to what
the original versions were! It does this anyway (or should do) by giving
the original name in the introductory paragraph, so it would just be a
matter of swapping one name for another in the article title.

Of course there would be disagreement on what to adopt as the "correct"
names. But the fact that people would disagree on *how* to implement a
proposed policy is not sufficient reason not to implement a new policy at
all, especially given that everyone already disagrees on how to implement
the current one! Everyone would learn a lot from the arguments on what to
adopt as the "correct" name, and that, in my opinion, would be a good
thing.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+

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