James Duffy wrote:
As we have an agreed naming convention, applied to
thousands of
articles, by a range of people from professional editors like Zoe and
bookworms like Deb to experts on constitutional history like John
Kenney, any unilateral attempt to abandon what has been agreed because
Mark has a POV he wishes to push, would be a gross abuse of wiki and
grossly insulting to the many people who solved what had been a
glaring problem. Mark may not like titles, but the fact that they
exist. Covering them accurately and factually is NPOV. Trying to push
an agenda that says 'I don't like them, therefore I will remove them',
is pushing a POV, is unencylopædic and grossly disrespectiful to the
large numbers of people who debated the issue, made observations and
have spent a year implementing the agreed wikipedia policy in a
professional, encyclopædic NPOV manner.
I disagree strongly, and your attempt to leverage credentials is both a
logical fallacy (look up "appeal to authority", or the equivalent Latin
phrase if you prefer) and grossly un-wiki.
The issue is that Wikipedia is endorsing certain titles, and not
endorsing others, which is inconsistent and POV. When we use Sir,
Blessed, and so on, and refuse to use His All-Holiness, His Excellency,
and The Honorable, this is a POV judgment, and unacceptable in a
professional encyclopedia.
If you do wish to use some honorifics, I would like to see some
conventions adopted indicating which we should use, and which we should
not. Why should the article on [[Mother Theresa]] start off "Blessed
Mother Theresa", while the article on [[Clarence Thomas]] does not start
off "The Honorable Clarence Thomas"? Is there a principle behind this
decision?
-Mark