[WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

Wed Oct 29 05:12:29 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:
>Transliterations can be tricky issues too.  Should we 
>always accept the current preferred transliteration, 
>or use historic ones when commonly used?  

Use the most commonly used form as per our 'common name' naming convention. 
However, "official" transiterations sometimes filter into common usage given 
enough time. Peking was once the most common name in English for the Chinese 
city. But a couple decades of the PRC insisting that the transliteration 
should be Beijing changed that. 

For now at least, "Makedonia" is a non-starter since very few interested 
English speakers will know that that is "Macedonia" (in American English at 
least, the "c" in "Macedonia" is pronounced as an "s", but a "k" is never 
pronounced as an "s" in English AFAIK). Given enough time English usage of 
that term may change or it may not change. It is not our job to hasten that 
change - our job is to choose the term most likely to be searched for or 
linked to by interested English speakers in the context of an encyclopedia. 
Of course we should still mention in the article the name controversy and 
what the Greek Ministry of Antiquities thinks the name should be. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)