[WikiEN-l] Re: anglicization is stupid

Wed Nov 20 04:14:41 UTC 2002

On Tuesday 19 November 2002 06:35 pm,  Toby Bartels wrote:
> Zoe wrote in part:
> >Well, no, I disagree that "*everyone* agrees" the names are incorrect.  In
> >your example of Confucius, should we use the old-style Chinese
> > transliteration or the new version?
>
> This isn't an argument that "Confucius" is incorrect,
> but rather that it's not quite clear what *is* correct instead.
> If any Chinese version is *more* correct than "Confucius"
> (a point that I admit that many here would deny),
> then any Chinese version would be an improvement,
> even if still not perfect.

Very wrong. What is most correct in English is the form used and recognized by 
the greatest number of English speakers. Dictionary makers realize this and 
make changes that reflect widest usage. This is an organic process that 
changes with time and we should prefer the terms and forms that are most 
useful to the greatest number of English speakers. 

> >Should we not transliterate at all but force those who
> >only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only
> > being able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?
>
> Nobody will be *forcing* any user to do anything of the sort.
> Every article should have all common spellings (English and original)
> in boldface in the first paragraph (we do this now if we know enough to),
> and they should have redirects from all of these that are in Latin-1
> (we do this now too if we know enough to).
> Searching will work; linking will work -- no matter who wins.

I have to agree with Zoe here. Back in March, April and May I moved many 
hundreds of articles from incorrectly named titles to correct ones per our 
naming conventions. Many of these were from overly complex non-English forms 
to forms that most English speakers would understand and find useful 
(Google's language tools were and still are a useful resource in this 
regard). I can't remember a single instance where the author of the 
non-Anglicized titled article made a redirect from the Anglicized title. 

In short: If most English speakers on both sides of the pond know a term by a 
certain spelling, then why have a convention that places the article on that 
term at a pedanticly "correct" spelling and then has to rely on redirects for 
what most people use? Remember the "surprise factor": users should not be 
surprised by where a link takes them.

That is not what redirects are for. Redirects are for doing the exact opposite 
- to catch non-standard alternate forms that are not as used as widely as the 
main form. That is why my idea of "redirect priority" never caught on as a 
way to make my proposed city naming convention work (in which Paris would be 
at [[Paris]] redirect to [[Paris, France]]). I learned the error of my ways. 
Please learn from my "redirect fallacy" mistake.

> >decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?
>
> Nobody is proposing this, any more than anybody is proposing
> that his name should be given ONLY in English.
> Rather, the question is which form is to be *preferred*,
> in particular which form is to be the article title.
> Every form will be (and is currently, when set up correctly) *supported*.
>
>
> -- Toby

What is and should be preferred is the title that is most likely to be linked 
to spontaneously in articles and what is most likely to be searched for. 
Please don't try to make contributing and using Wikipedia more difficult than 
it needs be by going down the opposite route. 

This idea of yours is also more complicated than you might think: There are 
many competing transliteration of many non-English terms. Which should we 
use? What about non-Latin charsets? It only seems logical to allow them so 
that we can have the exact name of things (there are also competing non-Latin 
charsets). 

This is madness and not at all useful -- leave the pedantic language lessons 
in the article itself. Technical matters that touch on ease of linking, using 
and searching for articles trump using the native forms any day. 

There is no reason to belittle the intelligence of users and unnecessarily 
surprise them by having articles at non-English titles. This is the English 
language Wikipedia, so lets stop the sillyness and title things in *shock, 
horror* English. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 