[Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

Tue Nov 19 22:26:00 UTC 2002

Hi Lir,

you do have a habit of holding positions that are inane enough to annoy  
almost everyone and reasonable enough to find a small minority of  
supporters ;-)

Brion nailed it. There's no point to redirect to "München" when I'm  
visiting the "Munich" page on en.wikipedia.org, and I'm saying that as a  
German. We have Wikipedias in almost every relevant language, including  
Esperanto and Latin -- if I want to search for the native version of a  
name (and am able to read it) I'll go to the Wikipedia in that language.  
To just force a redirect to the native language is simply confusing and  
unhelpful. There's no problem with mentioning the native name in the  
article, that's educational, especially if there's information on  
pronounciation etc. But if you think that simply enforcing redirects is  
educational, you don't understand how learning works.

This policy is valid for other Wikipedias as well. If I go to the  
"Kambodscha" page on de.wikipedia.org I don't want or expect to be  
redirected to "Kambuchea". This would only confuse me, and in many cases I  
wouldn't know how to pronounce or even read (for non-Latin characters) the  
native versions.

Redirects are good in case of full titles etc., e.g. when I'm searching  
for "Origin of Species" and get to "On the Origin of Species", or whatever  
-- here the original title doesn't create confusion, but carries useful  
information.

I agree with you that voting would be a good idea. Then this debate would  
already be over.

Regards,

Erik