Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote:
I have to say that the WikiProject Go would
dearly like to override
the policy on Japanese names, because the name order used in 40 years
or more of go literature in English has used Japanese name order.
So... let them? Will the servers collapse if OH MY GOODNESS NOT
EVERYTHING IS THE SAME?!!!
Names of people tend to be somewhat trickier, though, in that there's
usually more than one interest group involved. The canonical example of
this is probably diacritics in the names of ice hockey players: The
hockey wikiproject insists (or did, last time I looked) that the names
be spelled without diacritics, since that's the most common way they're
spelled in sports media -- and the national wikiprojects insist they be
spelled with them, since that's the most common way they're spelled
everywhere else, especially in the countries the players come from.
The discussion, whenever it comes up, then gets sidetracked into issues
of usability (how hard is it to type those characters?), server load
(does it matter if most links come via redirects?), hit counting (which
version, for any given name, really _is_ the most common?), consistency
(should we pick the most common form for each player separately, for
each country/language, for each specific sport, for all sportspeople in
general, or what? what about people who are both hockey players and
local politicians?), language politics (how to define the "most common
English name"? does usage by people speaking English as a second
language count? does it matter what some other-language Wikipedia
does?), prescriptiveness vs. descriptiveness (should we use the
"correct" name for a topic even if an "incorrect" one is more common?
what is "correct", and how, if at all, does it relate to "official"?),
turf wars (where should the discussion be conducted? who should be
involved? does alerting your wikiproject count as astroturfing? what
about alerting your local Wikipedia?) and general wikilawyering (what
does the current version of the naming guidelines say? what did it say
last month? do the topical subguidelines override the main guideline?
does existing practice override guidelines? does the fact that this
sentence seems to missing a word have any effect?)
At some point I was tempted to suggest a JavaScript hack that would make
the diacritics blink on and off.
--
Ilmari Karonen