[WikiEN-l] anglicization is stupid

Wed Nov 20 17:44:41 UTC 2002

Mav wrote in large part:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Zoe wrote in part:

>>>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.

Agree with what?  Zoe's not making a claim here,
only asking a rhetorical question that imputes opinions to your opponents
that *we*do*not*hold*!

>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.
>I can't remember a single instance where the author of the
>non-Anglicized titled article made a redirect from the Anglicized title.

Then you can't remember a single instance where it was done as I would do it.
No matter which term is used as the title or is used within article text,
*every* term used in English text (including native forms,
which are also used in English text) should have redirects.
Surely we can all agree on *that*!
So don't tell me that I want to have "Kong-fu-zi" as an article title
and no redirect from "Confucius" -- I *don't* want that,
and I don't know of anybody that wants that.
(Maybe there is somebody like that, and maybe they'll speak up now,
and then you and I can gang up against them ^_^).

>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.

Following a link to [[Confucius]] and seeing a page called "Kong-fu-zi"
that begins

'''???''' ([[551 BC]] - [[479 BC]]), also called '''Kong-fu-zi''',
'''Kung-fu-tze''', and (traditionally) '''Confucius''',
was a [[China|Chinese]] [[philosophy|philosopher]].

isn't going to be very shocking -- there's "Confucius" in bold up top.
(And if "Confucius" doesn't appear that way, then it wasn't written well,
and I'll be right in there with you to fix it when I see it.)

>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.

Nobody's changing what redirects are for.  Redirects are for moving us from
potential titles that aren't used to those titles that are used.
We're discussing which title to use, not the fundamental nature of redirects.

>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.

This again was not about redirects as such but about article titles.
[[Paris, France]] was rejected because we decided that it wasn't correct
(the French don't use the comma; English speakers in France
don't use the comma; the comma isn't used in England,
the closest English speaking country to France).
But whether we'd put the article at [[Paris]] or at [[Paris, France]],
there was always a redirect from one to the other.
The idea of redirect priority survives at, for example, [[Dallas]],
and rightly so.

(Actually, there was a little about redirects as such in that debate,
because readers that really need [[Paris (disambiguation)]],
so that they can move on from there to, say, [[Paris (mythology)]],
might be confused to suddenly find themselves at [[Paris, France]].
But this doesn't apply here; there is no other [[Confucius]],
which is why that page has no disambiguation block now.)

>>>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*.

>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.

I don't see how writing or reading will be more *difficult*.
What is most likely to be linked to and searched for
will be successfully linked to and searched for,
if the proper redirects are in place as I would propose.
Furthermore, if you find a case where the redirects aren't there,
then that would be *just* as wrong under my system as it is under yours,
and so would require correction under my system as it does under yours.
Under my system, the correction is to create the redirect;
under your (the current) system, the correction is to move the article.
*Both* ways then leave a situation where both names will work
in linking (thanks to redirects) and searching (same reason,
and also because both words will, if it's properly written at least,
appear in strongly emphasised text at the beginning of the article).
Either way will have the same functionality, if done properly
(and be deficient in some sense if done improperly),
so we're talking about a fairly small difference regarding
what will appear in the big header up top,
which strongly emphasised name will come first,
and which name will be preferred in the rest of the article.

>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 exactly what I responded to first in my previous letter.
This isn't an argument one way or another.
Whether we use The Original Name or What's Most Common In English Today,
we'll still have to decide *what* these things are.
If the former is more difficult to figure out than the latter
(since the latter can be found by Google -- but does that really work?),
then that's not an argument against the former,
because if we choose the "wrong" version, it'll still work out.
That is, the question for [[Confucius]] is not <Wade-Giles or Pinyin?>,
it's <Chinese or Latin?>.  *If* we decide for Chinese,
then either Wade-Giles or Pinyin will be better than Latin;
whereas if we continue with Latin (on the grounds that it's most common
in English text), then Wade-Giles vs Pinyin will of course be a nonissue.

>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.

I agree with the last sentence.  However, it is irrelevant.

>There is no reason to belittle the intelligence of users and unnecessarily
>surprise them by having articles at non-English titles.

Belittle their intelligence???  How?

>This is the English
>language Wikipedia, so lets stop the sillyness and title things in *shock,
>horror* English.

"Confucius", of course, is not English.  It's a Latin form of a Chinese name,
which happens to be the form of that name most commonly (but not exclusively)
used in English text.

-- Toby