[WikiEN-l] Naming policy for places (Mav and Ed, please confirm)

Tue May 11 02:50:55 UTC 2004

In a message dated 5/10/2004 9:24:26 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
david at nohat.net writes:
In the wake of the recent naming policy poll, which was sparked by the 
debate on [[Talk:Kiev]] as well as the poll on the New York City talk 
page, it cannot be denied that a firm policy needs to be adopted 
regarding the naming of articles about places.
Okay, I have a problem with this. The problem is that this is an old debate 
that is being rehashed. A long time ago, before Nohat or RickK were active on 
Wikipedia, there was serious discussion and debate about this. I am sure that 
Mav, Ed Poor, and a few others remember. I wish I could find the debates, but 
right now I can't. 

Now, it could be that the wrong choice won the vote (and there was a vote). 
On the other hand, we are opening up an old can of worms where consensus had 
been reached. This in itself is not a problem, so much as the implications are. 
In 2 years from now, when the current users are mostly gone, a new generation 
of users might well challenge the new naming convention we decide on now and 
come up with a new one--or perhaps the old one. It can happen again and again. 

When we decided on the naming convention, there may not have been even 50,000 
articles on Wikipedia. It happened before Zoe added capitals for all the 
countries, because she had to redo many of them manually to meet the new standards 
of the naming convention. Wikipedia is much larger now. Bots aside, we have 
many times more articles, and we will continue to grow. Reopening this can of 
worms will only impede real progress. We have a system. Let's stick to it, and 
we can discuss particular instances of potential exceptions on a case by case 
basis. 

BTW, another example of a convention that was broken and which has exploded 
again is the East Prussia series of articles. We had worked out (twice) a 
naming standard (with teh help of JHK), which was ignored by new users who knew 
nothing about the bitter debates that led to an acceptable compromise. 

Essentially, what I am saying is that what newer users might not realize is 
that certain conventions that they take for granted were decided after a long 
grueling process. Let's not keep redoing that again and again, any time someone 
who is not aware of that history joins Wikipedia. 

Danny
Wikipedia Historian
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