[WikiEN-l] Okay, so what do I *do* about Tessaiga?

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:12:36 -0700 (PDT), arromdee at rahul.net (Ken 
Arromdee) wrote:

> Wikipedia has an article whose name is a mistake, but people claim
> that the article must be named that anyway because our rules say
> that we must use the most widely used English name, and the mistake
> is used more frequently than the correct name.  (This happened
> because the mistake was made by a big English-language publisher,
> so a lot of people picked it up.) 

The fact that some manner of referring to something originated as an 
error does not inherently prove that it's not currently correct to 
use that terminology on the grounds that, despite its erroneous 
origin, it is currently in more widespread use than any alternative 
usage that is more technically accurate.

One theory (though disputed) as to how the city of Nome, Alaska got 
its name is that a mapmaker misread an explorer's notes where he had 
written "? Name" next to a spot on an older map to indicate that he 
wasn't sure what that point was or ought to be named; this got 
misread as "Nome" and it stuck as the official name of the place.

Also, our system of numbering years is supposedly based on the years 
since the birth of Jesus, but this is currently well known to be an 
incorrect count due to erroneous reasoning about when that date 
actually was.  And, of course, lots of common terms such as "sunrise" 
and "sunset" are incorrect by current astronomical knowledge; it's 
the Earth that moves, not the Sun.


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