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

Mon Feb 10 19:02:47 UTC 2003

On Monday 10 February 2003 01:45 am,  Erik Moeller wrote:
> Names of people, cities, tribes and so on are decided by popular usage and,
> in case of people, by themselves; academic opinion is of less importance
> here. There is nothing wrong with pseudonyms, and if people are primarily
> known under these pseudonyms, then that is the title we should use. It is
> also the more likely one to be linked. Names that are, however, in error
> (e.g. of historical persons) should not be used where there is a reasonable
> scholarly alternative.

OK so you don't want to do away with the common usage naming convention you 
just want to crack it open a bit in some cases. Well that isn't as horrible 
as I thought. But this does make naming a much more complicated and 
contentious issue. BTW I am offended by your implication in other messages 
that the common naming convention is based /solely/ on Google. It is /not/ at 
all -- Google is just a useful tool to quickly get a reasonably objective 
measure of at least Internet usage. It is just one component to be considered 
(granted often an important one), /not/ the determining factor. It is a bit 
of an insult to infer that those of us who follow our current naming 
conventions bow down to the Google god (as somebody else put it). 

> William of Ockham should reside under that title, as he does, which makes
> the fact that "Occam's" Razor is misspelled even more egregious.

Hm. You had to mention a specific case. Which academics are you going to let 
decide this one? Many different disciplines lay some claim to the concept of 
Occam's Razor and many of these disciplines use one of two different 
spellings. Mathematicians and scientists generally use the Latinized spelling 
while most historians use the "Ockham" spelling. Which academics do you think 
are correct? Yes, this is a historical term but it is also a term which is 
central to scientific thought and even to the scientific method. In my 
scientific training I have very rarely come across the "Ockham Razor" 
spelling. That is just one example where the word "correct" can't be used for 
either spelling -- therefore we should fall back to common usage (which is 
more objective in this case).

> No, because we should only abandon it in cases where common usage is
> incorrect and we therefore do not want to use the incorrect term for
> linking either. We will usually want to link to [[Marilyn Monroe]] using
> that name, but it is unprofessional to use an incorrect name in other
> articles, and therefore avoided.

I would therefore propose this addition to the common usage convention:

In cases where the common name of a subject is misleading (For example: 
[[Pennsylvania Dutch]] is misleading since it really is a dialect of German), 
then it is sometimes reasonable to fall back on a well-accepted alternative 
([[Pennsylvania German]], for example). Also, some terms are in common usage 
but are unreasonably offensive to large groups of people (Eskimo, Black 
American and Mormon Church, for example).. In those cases use widely known 
alternatives (Inuit, African-American, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day 
Saints, for example).  

This does not mean that we should avoid using widely-known pseudonyms like 
Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Billy the Kid, or widely-known common names of 
animals and other things. But it does mean that we need to temper common 
usage when the commonly used term is unreasonably misleading or offensive to 
one or more groups of people.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS I just did a spell check and "Ockham" came up as a misspelling but "Occam" 
did not.

WikiKarma:
Added a bunch of events to [[February 4]]; updated all the year pages and many 
of the other articles linked from that page.