[WikiEN-l] Re: Naming convention: popularity vs. correctness

Mon Feb 10 05:35:27 UTC 2003

On Sunday 09 February 2003 02:34 pm, Erik Moeller wrote:
> No, because that name is used neither by scholars nor the public. As I  
> wrote, I am not opposed to anglicization, and anglicization is by itself
> not unscientific. (There are reasonable arguments that can be made against
>   it in the case of European languages, but I do not subscribe to those
> arguments.) If there exist two different English terms, however, the one
> which is correct should in most cases be used, provided it has already been
> adopted by scholars.

Anglicization is the process by which foreign words are altered and enter into 
common usage by English speakers. If you support this form of common usage 
then why do you not support common usage when presented with two words which 
are already in English? 

> I think we need to change our naming convention to use the more correct  
> article title if everybody who knows the history of the term in question  
> agrees that it is correct; that is, if everybody who has a coherent POV on
>   the matter shares the same opinion. In other words, we should use
> academically correct titles, not those which Google prefers.
>
> Examples:
>
> 1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the  
> latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
>
> 2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
>   all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "Dütsch").
>.....

Hm. "more correct article title" Correct to whom? OIC to a small group of 
people. That is hardly NPOV. Titles are /nominative/ - and that is their only 
role. And as such, they should reflect what most people who are at all 
familiar with the subject call it (unless the term is unreasonably 
ambiguous). 

Academics are harmed the least by this since they most definitely already know 
what the common name of subjects are that they are experts on. But the 
non-academic isn't going to necessarily know what that academics call the 
subject. By extending the logic you propose all animals in Wikipedia should 
be under their scientific names, [[Mark Twain]] would be under [[Samuel 
Langhorn Clemens]], [[Linda Lovelace]] under [[Linda Boreman]], [[Billy the 
Kid]] under [[William Henry Bonney]], [[Eva Peron]] under [[María Evita 
Durante de Peron]], [[Marilyn Monroe]] under [[Norma Jeane Mortenson]]. 

It is also more academically correct to use somebody's real name, right? And 
it is even /more/ academically correct to use their entire name, isn't it? Oh 
yeah, it is also misleading to call an orca a killer whale since they are not 
whales and the term "sea lion" is also misleading since these animals have 
nothing to do with lions. Rubbish! 

Academics also disagree -- which ones do we listen to? Many also prefer 
foreign language forms. Should we use those because some academics think so? 
Getting rid of the common usage naming convention opens the floodgates to 
these type of arguments. By contrast trying to determine common usage is far 
easier in most cases. 

Abandoning common usage would make it more difficult to directly link to 
articles and find them. Above all else the name we choose should be the one 
that will attract the largest number of eyes and fill the largest number of 
edit links -- without having to deal with redirects. 

We are not writing an encyclopedia for academics and specialists, we are 
witting an encyclopedia for use by the masses. As such the subjects they look 
for should be at page titles that are recognizable by the largest number of 
people (with a reasonable minimum amount of ambiguity). But after a title has 
served its /one and only/ purpose (to get a person to the correct article), 
/then/ we can explain why academics think why the page title is not correct 
and then procede, where appropriate, to use what the academics in that field 
think is the best term. So in the [[Linda Lovelace]] article her real last 
name 'Boreman' is used, and in the [[Billy the Kid]] article 'Bonney' is used 
(although it is not certain whether that is correct though), and in [[Occam's 
razor]] we use Ockham's razor.

Page titles should reflect common usage in order to ensure our content is 
exposed to the largest possible audience. But once the person has the article 
in front of them /then/ we educate them as to why some academics think the 
common usage is not correct along with whatever else the article has to say. 

So instead of hitting people over the head that are wrong by placing the 
article at the academically correct title (giving them a jolt of surprise 
when they are redirected from a title they know to a title they don't), we 
allow them to land at the page title they know and then gently explain why 
academics think the commonly used form is incorrect.

We are also not working with a static set of articles here and each article's 
title serves as an example of our naming conventions to newbies. And one 
thing I've noticed is that, in general, newbies don't know about or care to 
use redirects.  

So how about we support the naming convention, that if followed by reading the 
naming convention or looking at examples, /naturally/ is the one that a new 
contributor is most likely to use when creating a new page? People look for 
things by the titles they already know - let's continue to follow this 
natural tendency and not work against it, shall we? 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma:
[[February 3]] and all year pages linked from there and many of the other 
articles.