[WikiEN-l] Umlauts in article titles

[Toby Bartels]

Mirko Thiessen wrote:

>I just came back from a month of absence from Wikipedia and realised,
>that lots of article titles about German cities, regions etc. have
>been changed from titles WITHOUT umlauts to titles WITH umlauts (e.g.,
>Moelln is Mölln now). I searched in the naming conventions, but I
>didn't find any conventions about this topic. Up to now, I created every
>article without umlauts (that means, with ae instead of ä). How should
>we handle this in the future? Is there a convention, which I was just
>too stupid to find?

I've argued in the past for using whatever spelling is common
in the place itself (rendered into English orthography if Greek, etc).
I mention that only to point out that I'm *not* speaking from that POV now;
rather, I'm explaining the *current* policy (to the best of my ability).

We're supposed to use the spelling generally found in English.
The question then is, what is that spelling?
We've been arguing lately about titles of mammal species' articles,
and this is the same problem -- all agree to use the capitalisation
that one normally finds in English text, but what is that?
In mathematics (and mathematical physics), my own academic fields,
one generally sees names written out with all the various diacritical marks
(and in English we do think of them as diacritical marks).
Thus [[Poincaré conjecture]], not [[Poincare conjecture]].
But for placenames, I can't speak with any authority.

If creating an article myself, I'd place it at a title with the umlaut.
But I doubt that I'd move an article that was placed somewhere else
(especially for old place names, which often have English "translations"
that are more than mere *transliterations* into English orthography).
The really important thing is what Dan said: Create redirects!
Unless the naming conventions address a situation explicitly
(and often even when they do), then one should create redirects
from any title that might reasonably be linked to.

>And what about the sharp s (ß)? Should it be used in article titles as
>well, or should it (as I did so far) be replaced with "ss"?

"ß" is rarer in English writing than "ö" and its friends.
So even if we write [[Mölln]], then we might still decide
that it's more common in English to see [[Sassnitz]].
(Here I'm assuming that the city's name is really "Saßnitz" in German.
I'm not sure if it is!  I wasn't able to find a clear example.)


-- Toby