1: I'd like to formally request sysop status.
2: 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. I don't think this rule would apply to most of
what has been discussed, kings and queens and
satellites and latin vs common names and all, but just
to these two and maybe a handful of other cases ("The
Beatles" vs "The White Album", "Myanmar" vs "Burma"
maybe).
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com