|From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
|X-Accept-Language: en-us
|Sender: wikien-l-admin(a)wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
|Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:01:50 -0800
|
|Tucci wrote:
|
|>I stumbled across the talk page at Vodun a week ago
|>or so, and some IP asked if it was the same thing as
|>Voodoo and if so, if the article should be moved there
|>because Voodoo is the more commonly used term. That
|>led me to the following conclusion:
|>
|>I'd like to propose a minor modification to the
|>current naming conventions that I think will make a
|>lot of the different sides happy. If experts in a
|>field nearly universally use a different term than the
|>general population, the expert term should be used to
|>name the article. The only two I can think of that
|>this would apply to is Vodun and Inuit instead of
|>Voodoo and Eskimo. Asking my seven reasonably
|>educated co-workers, six out of the seven have no idea
|>what Vodun is (though they've heard of Voodoo) and one
|>thought it was the capital of "one of them southeast
|>Asian countries" (for those keeping score, seven out
|>of eight paramedics are unfamiliar with the word, with
|>myself the only exception). Four out of the seven
|>were familiar with the word "Inuit" but said they
|>probably wouldn't think to use it. Three claim to
|>have never heard it before, though all seven knew what
|>an Eskimo was. Because experts in the field of
|>religion and anthropology use "Vodun" and "Inuit" to
|>the complete exclusion of "Voodoo" and "Eskimo"
|>(except maybe to explain that they're the same thing
|>at the beginning of an essay or paper or whatever), I
|>think the Wikipedia would seem a bit... well, dumb,
|>having an article about Eskimos when everybody
|>involved with the people in question refer to them as
|>Inuit.
|>
|The terms Eskimo and Inuk are not equivalent. Properly used the term
|Eskimo is a broader one of whom the Inuit are a subset. The term Inuit
|does not apply to those people who are in the more western, Siberian
|part of the range. People in the eastern part of the range consider the
|use of "Eskimo" as politically incorrect, and if they had their way
|would probably also insist on changing the name of the Edmonton football
|team. The best approach would be to move the material to two separate
|articles that reflect the different usages.
|
|Polls of a small local groups about what terms they know does not strike
|me as a sound basis for deciding what name(s) we should use.
|
|I am very much less certain about usage of voodoo/vodun. I've always
|considered that vodun was the Dahomean language word for God and that
|voodoo was derived from that. You are probably right to put everything
|under "vodun".
|
Inspired by this, I just added to the [[Saami]] article that these
people find "Lapp" very offensive.
Tom P.
O88