On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:18, Anthere wrote: Wikipedia in every language is intended for everyone who can understand that language. Or are you planning to kick me off the French wiki? ;) In general we should use the form that's most widely used in the language we're writing in; that's just plain sensible. Where alternate forms exist (eg the form in the language(s) native to or used by or in or near or with or in conjunction with the person, place or thing described), they can and should be noted (and usually are!), and if possible available as redirects. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion Vibber wrote: The biggest fallacy with this is what we mean by "most widely used". Some are fairly obvious. No-one would reasonably that an article in English about Rome, Italy should appear under "Roma". Still, the entire set of these obvious cases is only a small subset of the entire body of articles that could have this problem. When you try to translate everything the very real risk is that you end up using a form that nobody recognizes. If a name is not widely known, we should be favouring the original language form, with standard transliterations when that is applicable. With novels and movies we should be favouring the original language title; there is no way that we should be attempting the translation of titles that have never been produced in English translations. Whether the title of Camus's novel "L'Étranger" should be the literal "The Stranger" or the metaphorical "The Outsider" is a matter of literary debate that is well beyond the scope of this encyclopaedia. Using the original title for the main entry avoids that problem completely. I use the word "favour" carefully since a one rule fits all policy will never work. Nobody has ever used the English title for "La Dolce Vita" while the movie "Wo hu cang long" is only known by its English name. Eclecticology

Zoe wrote: Yes, we did have the discussion in the narrower context of movies, and agreed to proceed with respect while we waited for the issue to sort itself out. The problem is in your last sentence. How can we presume to know what "most English speakers expect to find"? Some movies have been released with different titles in the UK and US. Which is right? I think we also need a way to develop for convergence in a multilingual environment. Original language is likely to remain constant across Wikipedias. A reference to "La vita è bella" will be the same in the German or Polish Wikipedia. The texts may be different, but it will be clear that we are talking about the same thing. Eclecticology

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Beyond the scope of the encyclop�die Eclecticology, translation of "l'�tranger" in "the stranger" would be a disastrous one. Just as, if I ever write an entry for "stranger in a strange land" (un p�ch� personnel), I will keep the real english title and not try to translate it. ;-)) __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site http://webhosting.yahoo.com

Stranger in a Strange Land, is, of course, from the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, and should only be rendered in ancient Hebrew.

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Yup. En terre �trang�re, bah. I don't know Eclecticology, if you read some of Heinlein french translated books. He is the perfect example of an author who should be read only in english (or maybe hebrew ?). None of the translations are at the level of the original books. Which is probably why he is very little known in France. I would appreciate; Thanks ;-) __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus � Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com

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(a)telus.net> wrote:Magnus Manske wrote: 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 _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site

Toby Bartels wrote: I have no objection to that, either in this issue or any other that can have an impact on a large number of articles. In practical terms, the important thing becomes maintaining compatibility during transition.. I wouldn't expect that the people who might object to such a change would be too keen to work at it. Eclecticology

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? Oliver +-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

Oliver Pereira wrote: Brion Vibber replied: 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(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

Confucius says, "Better to be found by the wrong name than lost by the right name."

Oliver Pereira wrote: Confucius is not a good example for this debate. This name has in fact become very well established in English usage whether I like it or not. It is very much an exception among Chinese names. The derivitive adjective, "confucian", has also become part of English usage. Although I strongly support original language titles, an exception here is warranted. Eclecticology

You'll find it's CCCP in Cyrillic, Toby.... :-) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> To: <wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org>rg>; <wikiEN-l(a)wikipedia.org> Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 10:29 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid name-not

Toby Bartels wrote: Count me among the people who care about it. Even if we get a broad understanding on this the forces of dumbing down will continue to give us flak. Regretably, though I have noted Lir's efforts to address some of the complaints about her eccentric usages, some others are not so forgiving. I just find that she has a wicked sense of humour, and that is very hard on those who take themselves too seriously. People who take themselves too seriously often lead campaigns "to preserve our bodily humors". Another mailing list!!!!!!! I'm already getting 100 e-mails a day. Should I want more? Eclecticology

So it's "dumbing down" to speak English? How very European of you. Zoe Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:Toby Bartels wrote: Count me among the people who care about it. Even if we get a broad understanding on this the forces of dumbing down will continue to give us flak. Regretably, though I have noted Lir's efforts to address some of the complaints about her eccentric usages, some others are not so forgiving. I just find that she has a wicked sense of humour, and that is very hard on those who take themselves too seriously. People who take themselves too seriously often lead campaigns "to preserve our bodily humors". Another mailing list!!!!!!! I'm already getting 100 e-mails a day. Should I want more? Eclecticology _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now