[WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

[Daniel Mayer]

On Monday 09 December 2002 04:00 am, Larry Sanger wrote:

> A comment from Mav (whose judgment and hard work I admire virtually always
> :-) ) suddenly turned a light on in my head (i.e., I had a sudden
> realization)....

Thank you. Coming from you I consider that to be a great compliment. 

>....
> I think I understand now why Mav and some others were so seemingly (to me)
> peremptory about the issue.  It's because they are working on
> [[WikiProject Countries]], and they take it to be in they brief to find
> the appropriate short form name of every country on the list.  I suspect
> the people at work on this WikiProject see "People's Republic of China"
> and say, quite reasonably, that people call the PRC "China"--that's the
> popular name.  Similarly for the case of "Republic of Ireland" and
> "Ireland.  But again, that doesn't mean that "China" always means the PRC,
> or that "Ireland" always means the Republic.  The PRC and the Republic
> have been around for less than 100 years, and China per se and Ireland per
> se are ancient and far greater and ultimately more important than the
> modern states.

Yes, I guess this is the main reason why Jeronimo, me et al. favored China = 
PRC. We developed a naming convention for countries that was an extension of 
the official common name naming convention. Our focus for the WkiProject is 
on the modern states so I guess we lost the big picture. 

>...... In the
> context of an encyclopedia, it seems pretty obvious that "China" should be
> used to mean China--not just part of it--*all* of China, its whole
> history, its many languages, its people (all of them), etc.  This,
> unfortunately or not, means that the article about the modern state, the
> PRC, cannot dominate the page called [[China]].  Similarly, the article
> about the modern state, the Republic of Ireland, cannot dominate the page
> called [[Ireland]].  China and Ireland as topics are much bigger than
> those states.

As you should know from reading [[talk:Ireland]] I've already expressed the 
opinion that [[Ireland]] should be about the island, Irish culture, music and 
ancient history. The republic and northern UK-dependent territory should have 
their own articles. 

This issue and reading your email provoked me to reevaluate my previous 
position on China (thus my silence on this issue so far - which is very 
unusual considering this is a naming issue).  

It should be noted, though, that what you state above is not as obvious as you 
may think:

Princeton University's WordNet Dictionary
China
     n 1: a communist nation that covers a vast territory in eastern
          Asia; the most populous country in the world 

Also, Britannica Concise 
http://education.yahoo.com/search/be?lb=t&p=url%3Ac/china

Republic, E Asia. Area: 3,700,000 sq mi (9,583,000 sq km). Population (1997 
est.): 1,227,740,000). Capital: Beijing. ....

Of course we aim to be better than Britannica and other sources. So I guess it 
comes down to how much work we want to do and whether or not we want to be 
lumpers or dividers. I've always been more of a divider myself so what you 
say above has a certain appeal to me. (NOTE: Much of previous debate on this 
was based on NPOV issues relating to Taiwan's claims. I was also reacting to 
a suggestion that [[China]] be turned into just a disambiguation page! This 
made me see red and probably clouded my judgement.). 

You also mention a very valid ambiguity issue; China and the PRC really are 
two different things in spite of common usage. The reason is that the vast 
majority of Chinese history and the development of Chinese, art, science and 
culture occurred before the PRC. As our naming conventions state;  "..article 
naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would 
most easily recognize with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity.." I now see 
ambiguity that needs to be corrected.  

So I favor moving [[History of China]] to [[China]] and moving [[China]] to 
[[People's Republic of China]]. This will require some work on all the 
affected articles though (a lot of text needs to be rearranged and moved 
around). Then the history of the PRC will officially start in 1949 with an 
explanation of the major events of the revolution that preceded it. [[China]] 
will then be the main article that will introduce all things Chinese and link 
to more detailed articles on various topics - which includes the current 
republic at [[People's Republic of China]].  

But now we have a bigger problem; What about France, The Netherlands, Germany, 
Denmark, Mexico, and many many other nations whose current government was 
started way after our histories on them begin? With the new logic, it doesn't 
seem appropriate to have [[History of the French Republic]] mention Louis XIV 
or Napoleon. Or the history of the United States of Mexico say much about the 
Aztecs. This will require a great deal of work to sort out and can't be 
solved by just renaming articles.  

Yours in the WikiWay,

Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 

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