[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Suggestion: Pronunciation on all names

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/01/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> A suggestion from a reader, emailed to me:

> > As a lexicographer, I admire Wikipedia, and offer one suggestion. Ask your
> > contributors to indicate pronunciation where needed.
> > For instance, I had to look up an actress with the first name of "Cote." Is
> > it [COAT]? [ko-TAY]? [KO-tay]?
>
> Quite a few of our articles on people include the pronunciation, but
> it's far from universal. Would anyone be interested in a drive to fill
> out pronunciations? (What groups of Wikipedians are fans of this
> stuff?) Adding a field in the infoboxes might help too.

The problem is that Pronunciation Is Hard [TM].

We get this request a lot on OTRS, and the universal response is "we
try to, but coverage is patchy". There have been drives in the past,
but they've foundered on:

a) not too many people are motivated to do it;
b) in many cases, the people who are motivated to do it aren't the
ones who also know how it's pronounced;
c) we insist on using IPA rather than "pronounced KO-tay".

c) is kind of the sticking point. Very few people are confident and
competent with IPA; to most of us, it is at best something that we
encounter in dictionaries and try not to think too hard about. This
means that our editors aren't likely to add it (because they don't
feel comfortable using it, and certainly don't want to spend fifteen
minutes with a lookup table and some incomprehensible runes to get a
valid word), and that our readers aren't likely to use it even if it's
there.

But we don't have much option! Anything else is simply ineffective for
a project with such a wide and diffuse base of contributors and users
- saying "rhymes with X" or some kind of phonetic spelling is only
reliable if we assume that everyone pronounces X, or interprets those
syllables, the same way.

[This is also the reason why giving dictionary-style definitions for
normal nouns - "tomato" - would rapidly fall over; too much local
variation. Names and other proper nouns have a "right" pronunciation
regardless of where you are, though, so we can get away with it]

And we just have too many contributors, too wide a readerbase, to be
able to say that with any degree of confidence.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk