[WikiEN-l] Re: transliteration is stupider

Thu Nov 21 18:41:04 UTC 2002

On Thursday 21 November 2002 12:44 am, Toby Bartels wrote:
> NPOV, of course, has nothing to do with this (despite what Lir says).
> As you know, NPOV doesn't mean the majority point of view.
> It means presenting every point of view in a manner fair to it.

Key words "in a manner fair to it". In my world view what is most "fair" in 
terms of NPOV is to express majority opinions as majority opinions and 
minority ones as minority. This also affects the amount of text we give to 
any particular opinion in an article. So majority opinions get majority time. 
Therefore if something is known by a particular name by the great majority of 
English speakers we should reflect this fact in our choice of what to name 
the article. So yes, NPOV does most certainly apply.

> A truly NPOV title would be [[The city known to its residents as
> "München" but commonly called "Munich" in English,
> and which some people argue that we should talk about
> in an article entitled "München" becuase <blah blah blah>
> but which others argue that we should talk about
> in an article entitled "Munich" because <yada yada yada>]].
> But we can't do this, so we pick one or the other.
> Either is an equally POV choice (since the majority POV
> is as much a POV as going to the original name is),
> which is why we use naming *conventions* instead.

Either is /not/ equally POV. See above. And the description of things go into 
the articles themselves, not in titles so that anti-argument is no argument 
at all. 

> Under the current plan we also have to delve into linguistic usage
> (not *wars* that I can see, but I don't anticipate those in any case),
> to decide which usage is most common.  That's an issue of linguistic usage.

Eh? Finding out what most English speakers actually use is much easier than 
having to research what the residents of where the term is derived use it. 
Their language evolves too, just like ours. Should we use what they call the 
term now, back when the term was coined or some arbitrary date inbetween? 
There will also be different spellings and different use of diacriticals to 
deal with, not to mention competing terms. How in the world can an 
English-only speaker sort this out? The proposed plan is asking way too much 
and the more I argue about it the more I am convinced that it would be a very 
very bad thing to do. 

> I don't know about Lir, but I don't propose such a thing,
> because "mammal" is a common noun, not a proper noun.
> I certainly don't want to change all of our article titles
> back to Proto-Indo-European ^_^!

Well that is the road we will be heading down if this convention takes hold. I 
for one will fight tirelessly to stop this from happening. Already there is a 
continuum of opinion on how such a convention would work; Lir on the extreme 
"all anglicization is bad" end, you in the middle and Ec on the more liberal 
and IMO sane side. 

> >There is also
> >article rankings by Google to take into consideration: Articles that have
> > the searched-for name in the title are ranked higher. Why should we
> > purposely reduce article rankings and therefore reduce the reach of our
> > content?
>
> This is definitely the best point that I've seen so far.
> You can tell, because I don't have any response to it ^_^!
> I'll have to think about that.

The "Google question" is an important point to consider.

Below are some questions that you haven't answered yet to my recollection.:
1) There is also the fact that the proposed change absolutely requires the use 
of a technological fix to work (namely redirects). How is it less complicated 
when redirects are absolutely required? Not to mention the fact that the 
current display of redirects is rather ugly after following them. To fix this 
would require yet another technological fix.
2) Google's language tools can be used as an objective measure of widest usage 
whereas the proposed plan depends on subjective choices between different 
more native transliterations and language sets. 
3) How is it more NPOV when it shuns widest English usage for a minority 
naming scheme? 
4) What about the audience: How is it more useful for them to use words they 
can't pronounce, spell or are familiar with? 
6) What about the writers: How is it more useful for them to have articles 
that they can't link to directly (or at all when redirects are not made)? 
Also, most English speakers do not know how to make the more elaborate 
diacrtic marks with their keyboard. So they will have to copy and paste to 
make direct links. How is that at all user-friendly?
7) How would the proposed system not cause a chilling effect by favoring 
titles that most English speakers don't know? Remember: "Otherwise somebody 
will come by later and move the article and probably chide the original 
author for their Anglo-centric based ignorance." Just because you won't do 
it, doesn't mean that others will be so nice.  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)