As long as "Oliver" tries to stick to the collegial spirit of mutual respect, that is fine. But I find it odd his user account appears right after Lir is banned, and then he jumps in and makes edits in a fashion that indicates he is anything but a newbie. Not to mention him joining the list and "defending" himself. Lir is fast and loose with his online identity. So far he has just been using this as a role-playing "playground"... seeing what kind of personas he can get us to believe are really him. This is fun, and I don't deny anyone the right to go through this phase of their lives, but it can lead to difficulties on the Wikipedia when that is a persons main reason for being there.
If he can play nice, I'm happy about that. But if he acts up, as this post from Oliver seems to indicate he wants to do later on, I hope that we won't take as long to act this time around.
Who knows, maybe "Oliver" is a real person and not yet another alter-ego, and he is now ready to be accountable and deal with us on equal terms. That is a definate positive step forward.
Cheers!
Jonathan
On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 05:51:00AM +0000, Oliver Pereira wrote:
I must protest!
I know that I'm just a newbie here, and you're a terribly important sysop person, but Lir doesn't seem to be around right now, and I'm not going to let that attack go undefended...
Regarding banning Lir or not. If Lir can't be bothered to speak with Jimbo, stop behaving childishly (name-calling, whinging, and making guerilla edits that result in non-NPOV articles), and work in a cooperative, collegial, manner, then a ban is in order. The community has certain standards, and from what I've seen, Lir is as guilty as Helga ever was of flouting them.
Judging by what I've seen, Lir is an intelligent person with much to contribute. Childish, of course, but then I've seen just as childish behaviour from some of the regulars and even (perhaps more so) from the sysops. It seems that Lir is just more vociferous about it. There seem to be a lot more complaints about Lir's attitude and over-the-top pronouncements than about any actual edits, which surely should be what we are most interested in here. If Lir's actions are to be the subject of public debate, could we establish details of specific bad edits, rather than just ranting?
Lir's belief is very POV. Articles he renames or redirects in furtherance of that belief are therefore infected with that non-neutral POV.
This is just plain nonsense. *Everyone's* political beliefs are POV: that's the whole point of them! But an editor's renaming an article to give it a different version of its name doesn't somehow magically invest that article with the editor's point of view. Of course, one *can* insert a point of view into an article title, by inserting a qualifying adjective such as "Excellent" or "Rubbish" into it, but as far as I'm aware we're only talking about exchanging one version of a name (used by one set of people) with another (used by another set of people). This has no effect on the point of view whatsoever.
As to correct language and the evils of americanization -- bullshit, pure and simple.
Now, now, let's not descend into that sort of language. Lir has a point. I personally would be quite offended if English-speaking people were to rename *me* "Oliver Peartree", simply to make it more "English". I would consider it to be arrogance: who are they to decide my name? This was my name at birth, and always will be, no matter what anyone else decides to call me! Of course, I am exaggerating to make my point: no-one is trying to call *me* by any other name. We are mostly talking about inanimate locations and dead people, who are in no position to object. But the principle is the same. I think it smacks of arrogance to rename other people and places without the consent of the people and inhabitants of the places, even if the people and places are distant in time or space, and even if their renaming has now become widespread. And I am offended on their behalf, even if they're not. :)
But all this talk of emotions is just a side issue. The main point is not about what offends whom, or anything like that. This is an encyclopaedia. We're after facts. And the fact of the matter is that anglicisations of names are simply distortions (or replacements) of foreign names. Calling Jo~ao "John" is just an *approximation* to the truth in the same way that calling a Jean Claude van Damme "French" is. It's sort of *nearly* right, but not quite. The job of an encyclopaedia should be to correct these sorts of approximations!
While it is deplorable that most English speakers are not bilingual, that fact does not make it in any way sensible to change place-names, etc., to their "original" form. By the way, I'm not even sure what that means -- is it Strassburg, Strasbourg, or, as it was called before there was a clear definition between French and German, Straziburgensis? London, or Londinium?
I don't think anyone was arguing for *original* names of places, so you are attacking a straw man here. In the case of a place which still exists, I would argue that it makes most sense to call it whatever the people who live there do. It is, in a sense, *theirs*, after all. If there are several official versions of the placename locally, one could simply use the one that the largest number of locals use. We should aim to be most familiar with whatever is on the signposts, so that we don't get lost when we get there. ;)
Should Paris have a note in the title that says "pronounced Paree, you morons"?
I'd quite like to see that, actually. :)
We agreed that it made the most sense to use the most common English-language version of a name (different forms of English notwithstanding) for the title BUT, because we all felt it very important to let people know that other cultures and language-speakers had different names for the same thing, so we listed alternate names in the article itself. This means that English-speakers, arguably the largest audience, could search for articles in the way most natural to them, but the articles would still appear in searches by speakers of other languages searching in those languages.
Eminently sensible, of course. Which is why nobody is proposing the removal of any of these alternative names. As I understand it, the argument is simply about swapping one name round with another. Both names would still be there, but just in different places.
I can't see that Lir's political beliefs are valid reasons to change this policy.
It's not about political beliefs; it's about giving articles (arguably) more accurate titles. I hope I've laid out some of the arguments clearly enough. I probably haven't, but it'll do for now. Oh, and I should add that the language thing applies to all languages equally; I'm just using anglicisation as the example I'm most familiar with. Just thought I'd add that so that I'm not told to post this on the English language mailing list (which I haven't quite got round to subscribing to yet)...
Phew. That's enough of that for one day. I think I really *will* go to bed now... :)