[WikiEN-l] RE: Japanese Emperors & broken links

[Daniel Mayer]

james duffy wrote:
>Not merely are the names an utter mess 
>and unrecognisable to people who are 
>not already knowledgeable about Japanese 
>history 

And what about the people who are not already knowedgeable about particle 
physics or any other particular subject they are looking-up? Should those 
page titles also have extra meta-like information in their titles in order to 
make sure that the poor saps who know nothing about the subject don't even 
have to enter the first line of the article to know anything about it? Should 
our article on the Z boson be placed at [[Z boson (elementary particle)]] 
even though there isn't anything else called Z boson to disambiguate from?  

In addition, a properly formed sentence were such a term would be linked from 
/would already give that type of information/. So why is it necessary to have 
this information in the title when it is /not/ needed for disambiguation 
purposes? (Aside: if anything this opens up the meta tag debate again - but 
that kind of meta data would not be in the article title)

The "of country" naming convention was created to /disambiguate/ (NOT 
contextualize) European monarchs because there are very real and intractable 
ambiguity problems with their names. No such ambiguity problems exist for 
Asian Emperors because each name is a Romanization of names in different 
languages and no common names such as "Henry" or "Charles" existed between 
those different languages. Therefore the only time there would be any 
ambiguity would between different dynasties in the /same/ country but these 
are rare from what I've read so can be taken on a case-by-case basis. Either 
way "of country" isn't needed for disambiguation (it also isn't used by any 
other encyclopedia I've checked - see below).  

>(though the Japanese Emperor CALLS 
>HIMSELF Emperor of Japan in his own english 
>language press releases, Taku refuses point 
>blank to allow the designation 'of Japan' to appear 
>in the title, 

<devil's advocate> Fidel Castro calls himself President of the Republic of 
Cuba in his English language press releases. Shouldn't "of Cuba" be placed at 
the end of his name? You have mentioned the "permanence" of a person's 
position as monarch as a reason why "of country" should be placed at the end 
of their names. So why not include "Presidents for life"? What about that 
poor hypothetical 13-year old who knows nothing about Cuban history. 
Shouldn't he be able to instantly recognize the name "Fidel Castro" as 
belonging to a lifelong ruler of Cuba without having to read the first 
sentence of Castro's Wikipedia article or pay attention to the context from 
where his name is linked? </devil's advocate>

Rubbish.

Taku isn't the only person who has pointed out that it is not at all necessary 
to place "of country" anywhere where there isn't a demonstrated ambiguity 
problem. 

>or even allow Japan in brackets to 
>appear to give the unfortunate viewer the slightest 
>clue as to which part of the world the anonymous 
>emperor was from - we already have a long list of 
>undefined Chinese emperors, which means people 
>who don't immediately recognise chinese from japanese 
>will be presented with hundreds of emperors from 
>unspecified locations in the far east!)

Again this type of information goes in articles; first the sentence from where 
the term is linked should always give some clue as to who the person is 
(therefore when [[Hirohito]] is first mentioned/linked in an article he 
should be introduced as the Emperor of Japan), second, on the first line of 
the article on Hirohito it should mention that he was the Emperor of Japan.

Same thing for any other biography in Wikipedia. ////The context is 
established from where the article is linked and on the first line of the 
article in question////. 

Also, because I cannot save edits any article over 300 bytes right now (due to 
technical problems on my end) I'm posting here a response to a recent posting 
you have placed on 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(names_and_titles) 
. As you can see below /no other/ encyclopedia places "of country" at the end 
of Asian despot names (this is in direct opposition to a claim you made).
 
Per your last response to me JT:<br>
Contextualization is for the articles ''not'' the titles of articles. And all 
western students have at least some basic training in the sciences - so that 
is not an argument (Your discipline is not fundamentally different than mine 
in that respect - there is a very large degree of public ignorance in both 
fields but that doesn't mean we title subjects so that each one can be 
recognized by people who don't know a thing about the subject - we shouldn't 
dumb Wikipedia down so much so that it is unusable by experts). Also, nobody 
is objecting to Japanese monarchs being called "Emperor of Japan", what 
people ''are'' objecting to is the placement of this information in the title 
of the article ''when there is no demonstrated need for disambiguation''. As 
for "what other encyclopedias do" here are some results on looking up 
"Hirohito." Not ''one'' of them have the entries titled as "Hirohito of 
Japan" or "Emperor Hirohito of Japan." 
*[ http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761555671 
Encarta]  
*[ http://education.yahoo.com/search/be?lb=t&p=url%3Ah/hirohito Britannica 
Concise]  
*[ 
http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=505918&secid=.-&JServSessionIdxrefer=lox3nbxb8t&hh=1 
Xrefer] It does have his birth/death dates in the title but not as title 
text.  
*[ http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/h/hirohito.asp Encyclopedia.com]  
and,  
*[ http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=41436&tocid=0&query=hirohito&ct= 
Britannica.com]  
  
BTW, searching for "Hirohito of Japan" on Britannica and Encyclopedia.com 
doesn't bring up an article on Hirohito. So if no other encyclopedia is using 
the "of country" for Asian monarchs then why should we be using it? In 
addition, because we are a wiki it makes ''even less'' sense for us to do so 
because it requires us to type unneeded extra text and it also requires 
writers and readers to be aware of our odd nomenclature. In short, '''K'''eep 
'''I'''t '''S'''hort and '''S'''imple. After seeing the above results I 
consider the case closed. --mav   

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 10]]